NorCal Excavating Secures their Network and Improves Accessibility

Effective Managed IT

Client or Organization Profile: NorCal Excavating Inc. based out of Chico, California provides commercial, industrial and public work excavating services that help customers with everything from demolition to underground utilities, site grading and concrete.

NorCal Excavating has multiple crews, operates over 30 pieces of equipment and can do almost any job from start to finish.

Background: Ray Morgan Company Managed Services Specialist (MSS) Ryan Dunn met with Chelsea who is the vice president of NorCal Excavating. Chelsea expressed concern with their current IT provider’s ability to scale with the significant growth that the company was expecting. Ryan met with the company’s staff to discuss their IT requirements and found that Ray Morgan’s IT Managed Services could help them address their needs better than their current services provider.

Assessment: Ryan evaluated the IT infrastructure with the company owners by walking through the company sites. Ryan found that they were using a wireless line of site internet connection that resulted in poor internet connectivity performance with speeds of approximately 3Mbps x .75Mbps. Some of their departments were on a wireless network with poor performance as well. And there was no firewall in place to protect their site network from unwanted network traffic.

Their email was unstable and some of their staff was spending a significant amount of time dealing with software, hardware and network issues. The owners wanted to be able to access their company network and phone system from home which wasn’t possible with their current IT infrastructure.

Ryan developed a comprehensive plan to resolve their issues and improve their productivity.

Why RMC Was Selected: RMC was selected because executive ownership liked the idea of having Ray Morgan Company take care of all of their IT issues. They saw value in a proactive approach of updating hardware and software to prevent problems and using remote monitoring tools to find and fix problems. They appreciated the fact that Ray Morgan Company could scale with their growth and could be a long term partner having been in existence for over fifty years.

Ray Morgan Company Solution: Ray Morgan provided NorCal with up to date hardware and software. All of the new upgrades were approved and implemented by the Ray Morgan ProCare engineering team for high performance, affordability, key features, ease of use and supportability.

As part of this solution the following changes were made to their IT infrastructure:

• A new firewall was installed.
• Network switches and wireless access points for both offices were replaced with better devices.
• Their old phone system was replaced with an advanced voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) digital phone system.
• Both offices were outfitted with enterprise grade wireless access points.
• High performance computer-aided-design (CAD) desktop workstations were deployed.
• POP3 email service was migrated to a hosted Microsoft 365 solution.
• Personal printing and scanning devices were decommissioned and replaced with networked business grade multi-function-devices (MFDs) and networked them for both offices (neither business had a network copier/printer before).
• Remote monitoring software was added to their workstations to allow the Ray Morgan helpdesk to quickly provide support without having to be onsite.

Implementation: Comcast was brought in as a partner to build out internet and phone services (Comcast was able to cover a lot of the cost of the build out with minimal install cost to the customer). Service levels for internet improved dramatically to 80Mbps x 10Mbps.

Ryan worked with the customer to install an underground network connection to join both of their office buildings. This increased network performance.

A transparent work-from-home solution was developed to provide corporate phone and server connectivity. The customer experience was the same whether they were at home or at the office.

Post Install Benefits: NorCal Excavating now enjoys greater internet service provider bandwidth, wired connections between office buildings, and robust wireless connectivity resulting in improved office productivity. The higher speed internet service provider connection enabled Ray Morgan Company to successfully maintain offsite data backups with no lost connections during file transfers and reduced data backup times.

The employees have the flexibility to work from home with a company work phone and remote network connections so their location is transparent to their customers. They can now remotely connect to the server that hosts their work files without taking any extra steps.

And the customer can now share their multi-function-devices over the network.

Summary: Ryan Dunn took a big picture view of the customer’s needs and designed an IT Infrastructure solution that made their life easier and more productive. The customer is delighted to have the flexibility to work from home and also the convenience of a high performance network including a security solution at the office.

The Ray Morgan helpdesk technicians are available via the web and phone to address issues and maintain NorCal excavating’s hardware, software and network solutions. Ray Morgan is looking forward to continuing the relationship with NorCal excavating for years to come.