In 1985 V&S started in the United States with Columbus Galvanizing. The business grew in the eighties to 21 companies. In the nineties, the unification of Germany gave the opportunity to build and acquire six companies in Germany, two in France and one in Belgium. The U.S. operations have grown to nine companies with 7 galvanizing locations. In 2008 V&S Galvanizing LLC became part of Hill & Smith Holdings PLC, and looks forward to further growth. Part of that further growth has been the addition of the V&S Memphis Galvanizing plant in Millington, TN and the new replacement of the V&S Columbus Galvanizing plant and Corporate offices in Columbus, Ohio.

For more than 80 years, Agland Co-op (now Heritage Cooperative) has helped agricultural producers and business owners in this community maximize their opportunities and achieve their goals.  Agland works directly with producers of agriculture and energy commodities to deliver their products to the market and maximize their profitability. 

Organizations face a challenge at some point: Should I consider an MSP? Or should I keep, or hire, an IT Technician?  The leadership looks across the enterprise and sees the need for some help in IT, brought on by two types of challenges: the needs of a growing business and the increased complexity of technology in general.  The growing business is challenged by the sheer volume of expanded technology needs and processing.  And for any organization, the complexity of technology grows, with decisions about on premise, cloud and SAAS systems, new security threats, and the likely occupation of someone’s time not well versed in IT.  We see many small organizations that try to have a CAD engineer do it, or the CFO works on it part time.  It is not a good use of resources and two areas of the organization are affected.

This then raises the question: Should I hire an IT Tech (or add more), or look for another option?  That option, which is attractive for businesses is a “Managed Service Provider”, or MSP. An MSP is a company you contract with to take care of your IT needs, and they are obligated for certain services and results.

But why not hire or add IT techs as employees?

A single tech, or small IT department presents significant limitations.

First, there is limited time. Let’s assume you have one IT Tech; that provides roughly 40 hours a week (or less of services).  But the problem is one of bandwidth, not capacity. You may have only 40 hours of needs per week, or even less.  But what if the needs are simultaneous?  Multiple users have a need at once, or a project must be completed that will be take longer than reasonable. The impact of delays in these areas is delays in business deliverables like proposals and shipments, and a slow down on business growth momentum – it is a bottleneck.

The second limitation is in knowledge.  IT is a diverse area of skills – no one person can adequately do all the support needed. They may be strong in email but very weak in backups, capable in desktop support, but weak in security.  There are actually at least nine distinct technology areas every small business needs skills in, and one person, or even two, cannot meet the needs.  You may even think you are getting adequate expertise, but how do you know it was all done correctly and no issues will arise tomorrow? There will invariably be a failure in a key area.

And finally, related to the inability to know if the skills are adequate, there is a limitation of ability for the business to know what is happening in IT. For the average business leader, the ability to understand IT is limited, and you will pay for this when you must accept the single view of your one IT Tech.  You cannot manage to a result, or even a budget.  We have seen countless times where the single IT Tech told the business they need litany of very expensive equipment and software, but they are building a technology candy store – not an IT function sized to the needs of the business. But how can you know?  You cannot.

What will an MSP give me?

A “Managed Service Provider”, or MSP is a company you contract with to take care of your IT needs, and they are obligated for certain services and results.

The contract will likely include these characteristics:

• Outcomes based: Service Level Agreements (SLA) on response to user needs or uptime.
• Easy to understand deliverables: You sign an agreement for deliverables you can grasp, such “offsite backups”, and avoid discussions about “how do offsite backups work?” and “Can I buy some servers for my basement to do the offsite backups to there?” (Yes, we saw that!)
• A fixed monthly fee for a set of fixed services – Most clients of Keystone can reliably budget for the monthly cost, and have little other costs for technology.
• A single point for when issues happen – With a contracted set of comprehensive services, a single call to the MSP can assign them the responsibility for handling issues and the reaction to resolve the issue.

And with the MSP of a minimum size, you will get multiple people with deep knowledge of all the areas you will need them for: security, email, PCs, mobile, network, internet, server management, backups, etc. You will also have more bandwidth for projects so they can be accomplished more quickly; for example, upgrading all the PCs to the new version of Office in one week instead of two months, so all users are compatible with each other sooner.

And finally, the qualified MSP will bring their own tools, which can be expensive, such as help desk and monitoring software, hosted systems and offsite backups, and bundled productivity tools like Microsoft Office 365.

You owe it to yourself to consider Keystone as your MSP!

If you are at a point of considering this subject, you must consider using an MSP.  Keystone Technology Consultants manages the IT environments for organizations of over 300 users, and has the skills to help you at a fixed monthly cost. Contact us today to see how we can help!

As your team discusses your business issues, no doubt you are trying to do more with less or extract some more efficiency from a process. These are perfect opportunities for technology solutions. As part of our ongoing series to solve business issues using technology, we take a look at an excellent technology tool that interacts well with most of your ERP’s and can deliver tangible results to every department. In this edition, we try to make a case for the use of barcode scanners within your operation. This is not just a shipping and receiving solution, this benefits production, procurement, sales, and finance.

As your team discusses your business issues, no doubt you are trying to do more with less or extract some more efficiency from a process. These are perfect opportunities for technology solutions. But, since there are as many options as there are issues, a defined and systematic plan involving a seasoned IT leader is the ideal starting point.

May 2017 Top 3 Steps When Selecting Applications

As most of our customers are experiencing sustained growth, there are a few questions that I get asked regularly.  My guess is that it is probably relevant to you also- so I try to bring these questions and our insight to this newsletter often.

The Problem of CIOs in Small-Medium Organizations

Organizations are designed with responsibilities and personnel capable to carry them out.  These are then placed in a hierarchical structure we see reflected in an “org chart”.  One of the boxes on this chart an organization sees a need for is a CIO or CTO, to reflect the need for somebody to be responsible for the information technology function and have the capabilities to carry it out.

But small organizations rarely start off with a CIO; instead they start off with a junior help desk person or perhaps a network administrator.  The cost of starting off with a highly skilled CIO is too high and having them do helpdesk work or fixing printers is not an effective use of budget.  But having the low-end skills of a help desk person doesn’t provide the organization with the ability to align the business and technology. IT personnel new in their career or more junior by default focus more on the technology and gadgets than they do on the business needs and technology that would solve their problems.  They request a lot of budget, but bring little new ideas to production that will help the business. By having the junior person on staff the organization is not only faced with a lack of necessary skills, they also now must manage a skill they have little understanding about.  This creates ineffective decisions and misspent funds.

You might consider at this point “Why not hire a CIO?”  For organizations of less than 500 users a CIO would be a luxury. They are a fairly expensive proposition, and with the revenues of the organization they would not have enough funds to invest to take advantage of their skill set. They would have great ideas about implementing new sales force automation, e-commerce systems, inventory management and other exciting prospects for the business, but then face a budget that does not allow them to implement them.

What is the solution then? How can an organization have these essential skills and yet spend the right amount for their size?

Solution: A VCIO

A “Virtual CIO”, or as we will refer to it, a VCIO, is a fractional or part-time resource that can work with the business leaders of the organization and oversee IT operations.  They may work between 16 and 40 hours per month depending on the investment level and project status.  Sometimes they may be close to full time, but generally it will be much less than that.  They will be present for key meetings about the business strategy or perhaps the weekly operational meeting to review business status, and will do work on their own to review options, speak with IT staff, or end users about key issues.  You as an organization will pay for only what you need.

Business team at the office

Some capabilities and services of the CIO can offer you are:

• IT Strategy: develop an overall plan for information technology based on the discussions with business leaders and understanding of the industry and market conditions.
• Understand the business: the key issue here is that the VCIO will be a part of your management team, and will listen from a technology perspective to the problems the business has. Every person on the management team comes from a different focus, a sales manager will talk about how to increase sales, or a production manager will be focused on how production works with the rest of the organization. The VCIO will listen from a technology perspective so that when they hear problems they will contemplate and suggest options that employ technology in ways that others on the team have not considered.
• Design the technology platform, policy and process, and personnel for the current and future needs of the business. These are the three key aspects of IT: the technology put in place such as which ERP system or servers to use, the process IT uses to support and manage systems and users, and the personnel and their roles within the IT department. The VCIO can align these to provide a fully effective IT function that meets the needs of the business.
• Business Process Mapping – people with an IT skill set are often very keen on the business process and flow of data through the organization. A skilled VCIO can help you map the business process and identify bottlenecks and points where efficiencies can be gained either by implementing technology or changing a business process.
• IT Roadmap aligned to the business: they can develop a roadmap of technology changes and suggested projects with business analysis included to show you how the future can look with technology options.
• Benchmarking IT capabilities against industry-standards: most markets are competitive, and technology is an enabler to increase the velocity of the business. To the extent a business uses IT well compared to others, they will have a greater velocity of revenue generation, product creation and production, and cash management. These key aspects of the business must exceed the competition or you will look up from the bottom of the market. A VCIO can help you benchmark and improve this.

Having a VCIO will provide your business with a single point of contact for IT needs that aligns to the business, a partner invested in your long-term needs, and a technology leader to sit with the CEO, CFO, and other business champions and make sure the technology is an enabler for the business.

Keystone’s VCIO Offering

Keystone offers a VCIO service for its clients that may be of great help to you. If you are looking to have a better understanding of what technology can do for your business, and invest your funds to maximize ROI, then we can provide a resource to you that will produce in the areas we’ve listed above to propel your business forward.

Contact us today to discuss how we can help you for a manageable cost and maximum results.

As you start to see the early results of your 2017 strategy, you may start to look for tweaks or solutions for those results to maintain positive momentum.  No doubt you are looking for business solutions.  But, what you are ultimately finding at the root of those business solutions is some form of technology.  That’s fantastic, except what you lack on your leadership team is a voice representing technology.

Buying a laptop is a task you will probably do often in your life. You may need one for work and must operate within some corporate requirements for manufacturer or budgets, or purchase one for personal use or as a gift for a family member. It is important to have a good approach to selecting and buying a laptop to get the most value out of it. We cover some important aspects of this here.