GTA Roofing Company

The #1 roofing company in the Greater Toronto Area, in business since 1975 with 40,000 commercial and residential installations, was growing faster than their systems could handle. Their network consisted of a peer-to-peer collection of PCs running several standalone applications for prospecting, sales, scheduling and accounting. Information sharing was difficult at best requiring much re-entry of data from one application to another.

The network performance was poor and availability was sporadic. The physical layer was improperly installed, disorganized and ports were failing making it even more difficult to share information or access email and the Internet. As many as 25 roofing crews were scheduled and managed manually. It was clearly time for a new application, and a technology refresh.

After analyzing the business requirements and understanding the company's goals, a new line of business application was selected that integrates CRM, accounting, production, scheduling and information management. The IT infrastructure was architected to optimize performance and minimize ongoing system administration requirements.

Two new rack-mount HP servers, UPS, firewall, switches, wireless access, a high performance backup subsystem and all new workstations were installed and cabling issues were corrected. The network architecture was based on a thin-client model utilizing Microsoft Terminal Services.

Legacy applications and data were ported to the new environment to allow for a parallel operation during the implementation, training and conversion process. Email was and is hosted externally but user mailboxes are stored on the server as opposed to individual workstations facilitating backups.

The IT Infrastructure performs so well that the software vendor has consulted with us on subsequent installations and relies on Trump extensively to troubleshoot issues that arise due to version upgrades. Managed Services has been deployed for server monitoring and management allowing us to proactively manage the network, detect and react to issues quickly either remotely or on site.