Manufacturing and Distribution (M&D) companies struggle to maintain business and technology operations during and after disruptive change (divestiture, pandemic, industry 4.0) or expansion and organic growth by mergers and acquisitions. These struggles are due to resource constraints on capacity, scale, and skillset, and these gaps can create various risks for interrupting the business and causing security and compliance gaps. Additionally, changes can put a strain on internal IT’s ability to not only keep up, but also to drive innovation and expansion efforts.
 

Customer Challenge

A manufacturing company had been acquired by another firm and within a few short years, that firm was acquired. These quick changes led to a great deal of disruption and operational challenges.
 
The manufacturing company also had a culture of doing as much in-house as possible and looked to solve their capacity and skillset gaps by hiring full time staff. They continually struggled to deliver service desk in-house due to high turnover and the inability to manage staffing and operations to meet their Service Level Agreements. The company was losing trust in IT and poor performance resulted in user frustration and dissatisfaction. Additionally, their senior engineers and architects were tasked with support desk responsibilities which resulted in delays in business-critical projects and IT initiatives.
 
Senior leadership recognized that their current solution was neither an efficient nor cost effective model. Through conversations about current business needs and challenges, the topic of partnering with BDO Digital for support desk became a priority. 
 

Managed Services Solution

After learning of BDO Digital’s successful delivery model, the maturity of the team’s technical depth and breadth, and the focus on user experience, the company selected BDO Digital to deliver its Service Desk solution.  
 
After successfully onboarding and realizing the value of Service Desk, the customer engaged BDO Digital to extend its managed services model to include the company’s infrastructure and cloud ecosystems which further improved business operations, work from home models, and provided a foundation to support additional acquisitions and organic growth. 
 

Benefits and Next Steps

With a solid IT foundation in place and the support of BDO Digital, the company has bridged their collaboration gap and brought together IT and business to focus on business strategy. This has allowed the organization and BDO Digital to shift their focus toward business enabling and value-added projects, while offloading other critical and foundational IT functions to BDO Digital.

Since onboarding Managed Services, users are happier and more productive knowing that they are supported on a 24X7 basis and their technology solutions are highly available and secure. The customer has experienced decreased business interruption and downtime due to quicker problem identification and remediation, resulting in a significant 15% reduction in the amount of time it takes the customers sales team to work through their bid process, which increased their productivity and reduced the time and cost of the sales cycle.  
 
This growing M&D customer now has confidence that their technology investments are well supported and can more effectively act as a center piece to fueling business growth. The company and BDO Digital are now focusing on a data strategy to allow the organization greater visibility into their operations and inventory data, while also looking to predict customer browsing and purchasing behavior.