stanley consultants inc

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:06:39 -0400 - Posted in healthcare management consulting firms





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Industry Focus

Consulting engineering

Size

1,600 engineers and consultants, 19 U.S. and 12 international offices

Networking Solution

An MPLS-based IP network drives centralized, bandwidth-intensive applications out to offices and remote job sites

Business Value

Easier collaboration between offices; ready access to specialized engineering and project management tools, with better performance and reliability

About Our Customer

Stanley Consultants provides engineering, environmental and construction services worldwide. Its growing network of U.S. and global offices serves a wide variety of client types including energy, land development, industrial, institutional, government, commercial and utility clients. Founded in 1913, Stanley Consultants has worked in all 50 states and in 98 countries. The firm is  owned entirely by its employees, who are referred to as members.

Situation

Even though Stanley Consultants’ projects are managed through its local offices, the growing scope of its work calls for extensive collaboration and coordination between teams in different offices -- as well as with clients, contractors and sub-contractors. Stanley Consultants’ engineering and management work also relies heavily on hundreds of highly specialized applications, and a full array of communications tools ranging from conferencing to document sharing. The challenge for the IT organization is to assure that the right technologies are always delivered when and where needed to allow the firm to operate as single, highly efficient team in support of its clients.

Solution

Stanley Consultants opted to run its U.S. locations-- permanent offices as well as some local job sites-- over a network-based virtual private network that allows the company to support multiple applications while making optimum use of bandwidth and networking capacity. The MPLS-based VPN allows the company to run high-demand services such as voice and video conferencing without compromising service to other applications.

Managing Hundreds of Projects, Thousands of Engineers

At any given time, Stanley Consultants may be at work on hundreds of projects across the U.S. and worldwide. The firm’s engineers, architects, planners and construction services managers could be involved in upgrading a coal-fired power plant, doing structural engineering for a major highway bridge, designing and building a wastewater treatment plant, or even performing the planning for a residential housing development.

With a history of nearly 100 years, the Iowa-based company takes pride in the fact that much of its work comes from clients who it has done business with before. Indeed, Stanley Consultants has relationships that extend back decades. While a mid-sized firm by industry standards, the company has an outsized reputation for experience and reliability in its core disciplines which proves helpful in a business where virtually every project is vigorously pursued by competing firms.

Stanley Consultants organizes its practice along market lines, such as energy, federal government, land development, transportation, water resources and water/wastewater. This enables it to focus on the particular relationships and expertise needed to land projects.  But these teams are ‘virtual’ in the sense that they may be spread across any number of Stanley Consultants’ nearly 20 U.S. offices.

“Our power generation project teams, for example, have some members in Denver and some in Muscatine, as well as other locations,” said Senior Network Analyst Kevin Madsen, “while our federal project teams may include members in locations such as Muscatine, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and West Palm Beach.  Add to that all the temporary project offices that we set up and you can say that Stanley Consultants literally operates all over the map.

“Most of what we do in IT is focused on helping those teams and offices collaborate effectively, and making sure we deliver the tools and technologies needed to support clients -- wherever they happen to be. That’s where our MPLS-based VPN comes in. It supports anything from conventional office systems to document sharing, project management, CAD/CAM, dozens of highly specialized systems and video conferencing as well as enterprise tools such as Internet, intranet, email and HR.”

Creating a Better Platform

About two years ago, Madsen and Stanley Consultants’ IT team began to notice that the existing network architecture wasn’t up to the task of supporting the company’s voracious need for inter-office communication. The company had been using a private VPN that ran over the public Internet which had worked admirably for years.  “We realized, however, that we needed a more sophisticated way to manage and prioritize our bandwidth,” said Madsen.  “At that time we had just a single bandwidth queue. Someone would launch a video conference or initiate a huge file transfer and other traffic would be stacked up behind it. There was no way to prioritize.”

Users began to notice that video conferencing was not always predictable, and that there were occasional glitches in other applications. Madsen was also trying to add voice to the IP network, but the bandwidth issues made it difficult.

“We began to review possible solutions with the AT&T team,” said Madsen, “and quickly realized that a network-based VPN would address the immediate bandwidth issues, and create an environment that would open up other possibilities for the company later on.”

The new VPN allows Madsen and his team to set priorities and rules for the various types of traffic across the network, assuring that very sensitive applications take precedence over file transfers and other traffic that wouldn’t be affected by tiny delays in transmission. With the new network in place, Madsen is able to keep collaboration streamlined and friction-free across the organization.

More Efficient Voice and Video

Being able to prioritize and manage bandwidth made it possible for Stanley Consultants to complete the transition from conventional voice to a fully IP-based platform. The company upgraded to IP PBXs in all U.S. locations -- allowing voice traffic between them to flow over the MPLS-based network. Madsen is able to assign voice traffic with an appropriate priority to avoid compromising call quality.

In addition to offering cost advantages, Madsen realized the VoIP solution could exert a subtle psychological effect. “With four-digit dialing it feels more like you are making a local, in-company call rather than long-distance. There is no hesitation to pick up the phone and talk, as needed, even if it is cross-country.”

The network-based VPN also makes inter-office video conferencing much more reliable. Since moving to the new network, end-users at Stanley Consultants are experiencing fewer problems such as dropped frames and audio losses. 

“Overall,” said Madsen, “the move was completely transparent to our members. They simply notice that their video doesn’t break as often. We get far fewer calls saying ‘I’m trying to do something and it’s not working.’ We have eliminated a lot of help desk issues.”

Building Competitive Advantage

For Stanley Consultants’ U.S. offices, the IT organization provides a number of core applications from the Muscatine office -- creating a great deal of traffic back to headquarters for everyday tasks. Other applications and capabilities, ranging from remote plotting and printing devices, specialized engineering applications and systems such as CAD/CAM, may actually run out of local offices where they are most used. However, the ability for other offices to access resources such as drawings and documents is easily supported by the network-based VPN. 

To make sure the capabilities keep pace with the needs of the field -- and that they can be provided efficiently -- Madsen and Stanley Consultants’  IT team have a productive back-and-forth relationship with the end-users. “Sometimes they approach us and say ‘If we could do x and y, it would help us save time.’  Or ‘our competitors are doing a, b and c. Can we do that?’ Then we look at ways to deliver what they are requesting. On the other hand, our team is free to go out to the field and offer suggestions for improving performance, saving money or finding a better solution.”

One of Stanley Consultants’ strengths in the marketplace is being able to deploy and engage quickly once a contract is signed, or when a need arises. So when the electrical plant at a major client was taken out of commission by floods, Stanley Consultants had a construction trailer, PCs, network and engineers on site within days to help get the plant back online.

“Once a contract is signed we like to mobilize rapidly and get a site office up and working right away, with phones and everything else,” said Madsen. “We’re working on ways to get that all done efficiently and fast. I think our network capability will give us some opportunities there.”

The Next Challenges

Madsen sees ever-increasing bandwidth requirements on the horizon. “We now have a way to manage the bandwidth for our various applications, but those requirements will continue to grow. Where a typical file might have been 200 megabytes a year ago, it could easily be 200 gigabytes in the near future. We are relying on more and more intensive data sets such as aerial images, 3D laser-generated models of sites and other data that demand a great deal of bandwidth to store and move around. I think our network architecture provides the best environment for accommodating the bandwidth requirements.”

There is a need for Stanley Consultants to deliver robust networking for applications and collaboration at job sites, whatever the application. It’s also clear that Stanley Consultants’ members need to be very mobile in support of clients, while still having access to the same tools, technologies and communications they have when in the office -- even if they’re out in the middle of nowhere.

“We’ve only just scratched the surface of what networking can do in our business,” said Madsen. “We’re looking forward to working with AT&T to create even better ways to accomplish what we need to do as a company.”

Voice of the Customer

“Most of what we do in IT is focused on helping those teams and offices collaborate effectively, and making sure we deliver the tools and technologies they need to support clients -- wherever they happen to be.”

– Kevin Madsen, Senior Network Analyst, Stanley Consultants

 

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