Chandler Materials – Builders Merchants (Chelmsford)
Chandler Material Supplies is a 3rd generation family owned builders’ merchant, operating out of a 3 acre site in Chelmsford. The business holds traditional family values at the heart of its culture, supporting and supplying 100’s of local builders with building materials and supplies.
After many successful years of local trading the management structure of Chandlers was passed to the next generation of family who had had been tasked with modernisation and brand growth; utilising experience and knowledge gained in other corporate and business environments.
Ontraq was approached by the new Finance Director to look at the whole IT Infrastructure and to devise a roadmap for modernisation to improve reliability, add a high level of Business Continuity and to introduce working practices and equipment that would allow Chandlers to be more efficient in the key areas of administration and sales.
Ontraq set out a 2 year project plan focussing initially on the most important aspects of increasing availability and reducing down time.
Over the course of the next 2 years Ontraq have deployed a new high specification redundant array, dual power supply HP server with resources to cope with future expansion and a number of Hyper V virtual servers running business applications.
The desktop and sales counter PCs have all been upgraded with new HP Pro workstations running dual screens and hot spares have been deployed for emergency situations.
The network and Server room have all been beefed up and moved into secure clean locations with 24/7 proactive monitoring and new DR and Business continuity routines have been devised and tested.
During all this time the main sales and office building have been modernised and expanded and Ontraq have helped Chandlers through this period of change and modernisation technically and physically as required.
Chandlers can now boast to having a flexible high end, high availability IT Infrastructure that suits their ever changing needs.
