Case Study: Nebraskaland

• Costly on premises IT infrastructure

• Sophisticated pick-and-pack, mobile delivery technology malfunctioned often

• Dissatisfaction with unreliable small third party IT services provider

For quite a while, Nebraskaland was serving a dual role of distributing meats and managing its own IT infrastructure on premises. But as capital expenses grew and technology became more sophisticated, Nebraskaland decided it was time to transition the company from its in-house IT operation.

Nebraskaland was in a situation common for many companies today. The costs of managing, maintaining and supporting its own IT infrastructure heavily outweighed the benefits. A third-party IT provider could improve efficiency, decrease costs and remove risk. The company just had to find the right partner.

Nebraskaland had a server room in its Bronx facility equipped with an IBM® iSeries® production system and four full-time IT staff making sure all the hardware and software was up and running. But production boxes are expensive—running anywhere from $200,000 to $250,000 in equipment lease costs—plus the expense of internal IT salaries.

Then there were the critical overnight hours in the warehouse when orders were selected and loaded on trucks for morning delivery from their Bronx, New York facility. Approximately 50 Nebraskaland warehouse employees used radio-controlled, wireless devices to select and load the orders from the cooler and freezer each night. They received orders via headphones and use hand-held scanners to confirm that they were picking the correct product. If any of these systems go down, they need immediate support.“

Selecting orders in the middle of the night is a critical time for us. If a printer loses connection, a queue jams or some other obstacle occurs that the warehouse management is not familiar with how to fix, we will have a production delay,” said Dan Romanoff, executive vice president of Nebraskaland. “We’d have to wake up our IT department to come in or give instructions over the phone to get things moving again. In either case, there would be delays that impact our business.”

Additionally, the Nebraskaland IT staff maintained all the desktop computers throughout the organization. “We had outgrown our internal IT capabilities. We chose to move into the cloud and find a third-party provider to manage these services for us to make our systems and processes more efficient,” said Romanoff.

Nebraskaland conducted a search and selected a small New Jersey IT company for its initial foray into outsourced IT services. They moved Nebraskaland’s iSeries production box (that was still under lease) to a New Jersey facility and took over day-to-day IT services. However, it became evident that the provider wasn’t equipped to provide the seamless support and dedicated resources that complex IBM i systems require, and that Nebraskaland expected.“

This was a step in the right direction, but the provider was just too small,” said Romanoff. “There was a limited number of people we could count on in their company. If we needed help in the middle of the night, there was a short list of contacts to call. If we couldn’t reach them, we were left to fix it ourselves.”