Business supplies company drives IT transformation with GDT-managed NOC
Summary
Divestiture left a multibillion-dollar business supplies company facing technical debt, bandwidth constraints, and disjointed workflows. GDT delivered a multi-tower IT transformation, including establishing a network operations center (NOC) in under three months. With GDT for execution speed and managed NOC, the client was able to avoid TSA penalties, reduce operational risk, and build a new enterprise IT organization from the ground up.
Customer overview
Our client is a $2.9 billion business supplies company with 20,000 employees. This route-based company has more than 3,000 trucks that service 350 physical locations across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
The challenge
The company was divested in October 2023. Prior to divestiture, much of its infrastructure existed in a shared services model provided by the parent company.
To prepare for this divestiture, our client needed to transition infrastructure services work from the parent company’s in-house team. This included building an infrastructure organization from the ground up. This effort also included establishing a network operations center (NOC) within a condensed time frame specified in the Transition Services Agreement (TSA).
Challenges included:
- Establishing an infrastructure team, including processes
- Identifying, implementing, and adopting internal tools
- Starting up a brand-new NOC within a condensed time frame
- Working within TSA constraints and avoiding financial penalties tied to specific exit items
To free up valuable resources, the company decided to outsource its NOC to a trusted partner. Decision-makers outlined several project requirements, including:
- Fixed, three-month contract to go-live time frame
- Professional services support as needed during the TSA period
- Speed to set up
- Competitive pricing
- Ability to work as an extension of the client’s infrastructure team
- Willingness to use client-owned monitoring tools
- Flexibility in working with the existing ServiceNow instance
- Accessibility and quick response times
- Strategic alignment
The solution: GDT-managed NOC
The company partnered with GDT to implement a NOC supporting its 350+ distributed locations. As part of the planning phase, GDT consultants worked with the client’s infrastructure team to understand specific requirements and pinpoint issues that would be handled through the project or operational team. GDT adapted our standard methodology and approach to meet the client’s unique needs and requirements and accommodate ServiceNow platform constraints.
The GDT team partnered closely with the client, acting as an extension of its team and providing professional services as needed to support the divestiture. This close partnership delivered increased visibility into progress around common business goals. GDT also helped create awareness for staffing and services capability gaps that needed to be filled.
The NOC solution included:
- 24×7 real-time monitoring of networks, servers, applications, and other IT systems across 350+ distributed locations
- Level one and level two support for telecom and network-related issues
- Proactive detection and response to issues, outages, and performance degradations
- Incident management, including troubleshooting and resolution or escalation
- Alert handling and notification to relevant resolvers
- Ticket management and tracking
- Performance reporting and analytics
- Capacity management and planning
The approach
GDT’s multi-tower integration approach creates a higher value for customers than single-tower execution. Our proven delivery methodology enabled us to drive results for our client across several program components in addition to the managed NOC offering:
- Unified service center: Service Desk, NOC, MDM, and ServiceNow staffing under one integrated delivery model with shared SLAs and governance
- Data center modernization: Routing redesign, standardization of network architecture, resiliency improvements, and structured modernization aligned to business goals
- Prisma Access deployment (340 sites): Security design, policy mapping, testing, and coordinated maintenance windows for site migrations
- Wireless refresh (1,710+ APs — phase 1): Staging, ZTP provisioning, RF validation, site installation coordination, and remediation planning
- Professional services and advisory: Staff augmentation during TSA, support for analytics and Fabric-related initiatives, Meraki stabilization, network clean-up, and performance optimization
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The results
Choosing the right partner was a critical success factor for company leadership. The team needed a capable, trustworthy partner that could meet their requirements and work seamlessly as an extension of the team. The company’s IT decision-maker cited his choice of GDT coming down primarily to the GDT experience being one that is defined by relationships and strategic alignment.
From contract to completion, GDT stood up the company’s NOC within three months, meeting the TSA-mandated requirements and ensuring a seamless transition from the parent company. Furthermore, GDT streamlined NOC operations, delivering notable improvements in monitoring, uptime, and transparency.
Specific benefits include:
Increased transparency and visibility
Improved reporting and analytics
Access to skilled NOC technicians and engineers without the need to hire and train in-house staff
Scalable, flexible support that can adapt to changing business needs
Advanced monitoring tools and AIOps platforms
Integration with existing tools and systems
Enterprise networking solutions
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