Filtrona Extrusion implemented a network redesign and to guarantee uninterrupted business processes at sites across the United States and Mexico.



?Outsourcing seems like a sexy alternative for a lot of problems, butturning the management of your mission-critical infrastructure over toa third party is pretty scary,? says Jeff White, corporate director ofIT for Filtrona Extrusion. When Jeff White joined Filtrona Extrusion ascorporate IT director, the company was operating a single threadednetwork with mixed traffic mission-critical and non-mission criticaltraffic running side-by-side, with no way to separate or prioritize thetwo. In addition, the company experienced network performance problemsand increasing amounts of downtime at its facility in Mexico. Becauseits manufacturing facilities run 24/7 and do not always have on-sitetechnical resources available when there is a problem, the companyneeded a better solution.

?You just never know when things are going to happen, from a backhoedigging up a fiber cable or a more significant outage, and thesesituations were shutting down an entire facility,? says White. ?Becausethe network is critical to all areas of our business, we needed toimplement a fully redundant network to reconcile problems automaticallyand ensure we could remain up and running, no matter what thesituation.?

Filtrona Extrusion is one of the largest manufacturers of extrudedplastic profiles, sheets and specialty tubes in the United States. Thecompany manufactures more than 40,000 different products for medical,merchandising, aviation, transportation, traffic, lighting, fencing andcustom plastic industries. Its products range from catheter tubes,traffic posts and cones, plastic sheeting for fluorescent lights,air-conditioning ducts in commercial jets, and outdoor furniture.

All of Filtrona Extrusion's business and manufacturing processes rely heavily on its .The company's most critical business application is an enterpriseresource-planning (ERP) system that runs on a centralized server in thecorporate headquarters in Atlanta, with a standby server replicated inreal time and located at a manufacturing facility in Tacoma, Wash. TheERP system manages sales, manufacturing, purchasing, shipping andreceiving, accounting, and quality information for all locations,including additional manufacturing facilities in Illinois,Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Monterrey, Mexico.

White uses a custom simple network-management protocol system to pulldata off the routers directly in order to monitor the circuits andoverall network performance.

Since plastic is a commodity product, Filtrona Extrusion must maintaincomplete visibility of its inventory at all times to ensure purchasingdecisions can be made at the most advantageous price. Losing sight ofinventory levels for as little as a few hours can prevent the companyfrom taking advantage of spot-buy opportunities or force it to use amore-expensive, higher-grade of plastic than is required to fulfill anorder for a customer. Moreover, if the ERP system is down, the companyis unable to record quality data during the manufacturing process.Without the quality data, there is no way to certify that the productmeets the requirements specified by the customer, and without thecertifications, the product cannot ship.

?Our whole planning system depends on inventory,? says White. ?Withoutit, we don't know what materials to buy or how much to purchase forexisting orders, which creates some very significant business issuesthat can cost the company tens of millions of dollars.?

White's first step after joining the company was to evaluate theeffectiveness of his outsourced providers. He needed to understand whatthe current providers had done, and what they could do moving forwardto help him meet the company's strategic objectives.