Stechford Mouldings is the Leading Manufacturer Of Thermoset, Thermoplastic & Plastic Injection Mouldings

| Business Objectives

Stechford Mouldings is one of the largest and longest established plastic moulding specialist in the UK. With over 50 moulding machines, 100 staff and a turnover in excess of £10million they work with some of the finest manufacturers in the world including Dyson, Bentley and Indesit.
Stechford Mouldings have been a client of Leap IT since 2007 and during this 11-year partnership we have transformed their IT systems. Our latest project was to move the business to a new purpose-built 20,000 sq. ft. production factory in Birmingham. With the current production line running 24×7 the move had to be phased in over several weeks without effecting production.

 

The key requirements were as follows:-

  • Provide internet connectivity to the new factory
  • Dismantle the current IT infrastructure and re-locate at the new factory with no downtime
  • Supply a managed wireless network throughout the new premises with both staff and visitor internet access available 24×7
  • Provide a fully managed VoIP telephony system
  • Create a permanent link between the current factory and new factory whilst the move takes place
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Our Solution

Firstly, we installed a 100Mb fibre leased line to the premises together with all the necessary routers and firewall to secure the network moving forward. We then connected the current factory and new unit together using a WIFI wireless bridge in order that the production line can carry on running throughout the move.

Our award winning 3CX VoIP Phone system was rolled out to both sites replacing the old expensive ISDN system which also provided vital communications between the two buildings meaning employees could speak to each other using internal extension numbers regardless of their location.

A new Dell Rack was installed into the server room alongside 3 x Dell PowerEdge servers to run the critical software that operates the machines. We also provided fibre cabling throughout the 22,000 sq. unit to connect the servers, machines and devices all together on one network.

Lastly, we installed our Unifi wireless system to give complete wireless coverage around the factory. Two wireless networks were created to provide staff and guests access to the internet.

The Outcome

So successful was the link between the two factories Stechford Mouldings ended up keeping the old factory unit much longer than anticipated, taking their time to vacate the building to fit in with the needs of the business. Free calls on our 3CX VoIP Phone system delivered a 26% cost saving to the business as well as providing a more flexible telephone system that can be accessed by employees regardless of their location.

Stechford Mouldings also benefitted from a much-improved disaster recovery plan with critical applications being backed up to the cloud and to standby servers in the offices. This meant any outage on a server can be resolved by simply starting the application on another server. Since completing the works our servers now provide door access controls throughout the factory with a Paxton Door control system and CCTV has also been added across the internal fibre connections we installed.