Infrastructure Refresh for a Leading Metal Retailer

A leader in the metals distribution and services industry headquartered in Southern California with more than 30 locations throughout North America.

Founded prior to 1950, the company’s growth consisted of a series of strategic acquisitions and mergers that propelled them into one of the foremost steel retailers in the world. The organization has 57 locations, 170,000 Active Customers, 290 Distribution &Service Locations, and 11,000 Employees Worldwide.

As a result of the continued expansion through acquisition, the technology and infrastructure was cobbled together in a patchwork of systems that lacked cohesive design and were inadequate to support the collective organization. Core applications that supported operations were dated and needed to be replaced. Early attempts to deploy critical enterprise business applications, such as the Oracle Financial system, were severely impacted by performance issues due to inadequate network infrastructure.

The executive team decided to upgrade the infrastructure and systems for improved scalability, flexibility, and manageability. The approved solution needed to accomplish the following: Converge the current infrastructure to central data centers, Implement virtual technologies to improve productivity, mobility, and efficiency, Support business continuance (DR) through improved processes and technology, and Embrace best of breed technology to provide a very scalable and supportable infrastructure

Over the course of two years, ACS acted as strategic advisors providing architecture, implementation and project management services. ACS was selected as their preferred Information Technology partner due to ACS’s extensive portfolio of enterprise computing partners, certified partnership levels, implementation and professional services capabilities and their flexible financing options.

ACS completed 10 projects that spanned more than 30 sites, including data centers across the United States and Mexico. The ACS engagement strategy began with understanding “The Client’s” long-term goals. Prior to each technology initiative, ACS worked in conjunction with our customer and leveraged ACS’s proven phased approach to ensure the customer understood exactly what to expect prior to the projects’ kick-off. By working with ACS on this project, our customer was able to shortcut the typical stop and starts that most migration processes are riddled with and immediately began benefiting from the systems and infrastructure improvements.