THE COMPANY

Chandler Materials 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.

THE CHALLENGE

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 based on their experience and knowledge gained in other corporate and business environments.

The new Finance Director approached Ontraq to look at the whole IT Infrastructure and to devise a roadmap for modernisation. The aims were to improve reliability, add a high level of Business Continuity and introduce working practices and equipment that would allow Chandlers to be more efficient in the key areas of Administration and Sales.

THE PROJECT

Ontraq set out a 2 year project plan focussing initially on the most important aspects of increasing availability and reducing down time.

Over the the following 2 years Ontraq deployed a new, high specification redundant array, dual power supply HP server with the resources to cope with future expansion and a number of Hyper V virtual servers running business applications.

The desktop and sales counter PCs were all been upgraded with new HP Pro workstations running dual screens and hot spares were deployed for emergency situations.

The network and Server room were all beefed up and moved into secure, clean locations. Ontraq are providing 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 were modernised and expanded, and Ontraq helped Chandlers through this period of change and modernisation technically and physically as required.

THE RESULT

Chandlers can now boast to having a flexible high end, high availability IT Infrastructure that suits their ever changing needs.

In the X years since this initial project Ontraq have continued to provide day-to-day IT Support, Backup and Disaster Recovery services, new devices, and IT Consultation as required.

Chandlers have now taken over a new site in Southend-on-Sea and Ontraq are bringing the infrastructure up to standard there, as well as transtitioning the network to work cross-site.