Managed Services for Manufacturing

Overview

A leading industrial manufacturing and distribution company headquartered in the Midwest has built its reputation on delivering high-quality hardware components to customers across the country. With a diverse product catalog and a customer base that spans multiple industries, including construction and specialty manufacturing, the company operates in a fast-paced, demand-driven environment where precision, reliability, and speed are critical.

Employing more than 150 people, the organization runs a hybrid technology environment that blends modern cloud solutions with essential on-premises systems, including a legacy ERP platform central to its operations. Azure cloud resources support many of their modern applications, while Microsoft 365 provides the backbone for collaboration and communication across teams. As the company’s market presence grew, so did its reliance on technology to manage orders, maintain inventory accuracy, streamline logistics, and communicate seamlessly with suppliers and customers.

Business Challenge

Before engaging with Oakwood, the company worked with a local managed services provider that offered solid infrastructure support but lacked the ability to meet the organization’s growing strategic needs. Support quality varied from department to department, often creating bottlenecks in workflows and frustration among staff. As cloud adoption expanded, leadership struggled to gain clear visibility into Azure costs and identify opportunities for optimization. The IT roadmap remained largely reactive, which meant modernization efforts were frequently delayed and long-term planning was minimal. At the same time, rapid growth in customers, product lines, and cloud-based services placed increasing strain on the existing support model, which could not scale effectively to keep pace.

It became clear to the leadership team that they needed more than a traditional MSP. They wanted a partner who could combine reliable day-to-day operational support with forward-looking guidance, someone who could not only maintain their systems but also help them scale efficiently, securely, and strategically.

Solution

Oakwood stepped in with its Oakwood Complete managed services offering, a program designed to provide both the operational stability the company needed and the strategic foresight it was lacking. Around-the-clock monitoring and support were implemented across the company’s infrastructure, Azure environment, and end-user devices, ensuring consistent performance and rapid resolution when issues arose. An in-depth Azure optimization engagement uncovered inefficiencies in cloud usage, resulting in an 18 percent cost reduction in the first year without any compromise in performance.

Microsoft 365 licensing was reviewed and streamlined, eliminating unnecessary costs and strengthening security with measures such as multi-factor authentication and identity cleanup. Data protection was consolidated into a unified backup and disaster recovery solution leveraging Azure and Veeam, providing the assurance that critical systems could be restored quickly in the event of an outage. Quarterly strategic business reviews created a consistent forum for aligning IT priorities with business goals, refining security practices, and identifying modernization opportunities that would keep the company ahead of the curve.

This approach moved the company away from the limitations of a reactive support model and toward a proactive, Microsoft-aligned strategy that addressed both current needs and future ambitions.

Outcome

Within six months of partnering with Oakwood, the organization experienced noticeable improvements. Employees saw a marked increase in productivity as issues were resolved more quickly, support became more consistent, and centralized ticketing brought clarity to IT requests. Cloud costs dropped significantly as Azure usage was optimized, and licensing waste was eliminated, freeing up budget for growth initiatives. Security practices became stronger without creating additional hurdles for users, thanks to modern identity management and endpoint protection.

Perhaps most importantly, the leadership team gained greater visibility into the performance of their IT systems and the insights needed to make informed decisions about the future. Oakwood’s team became more than just a vendor, they became an extension of the company’s internal IT and operations staff, driving stability, reducing costs, and guiding innovation. Today, the organization operates with the confidence that its technology is not just keeping pace with the business, but actively enabling its continued growth and success.