The Customer

Multiquip, with headquarters in Carson California was founded almost 40 years ago. It is one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of top quality products for the construction, telecom, government, aerospace, entertainment, and oil & gas exploration markets.

Multiquip’s diverse product line encompasses three categories – light to medium construction equipment, power generators, and lighting. The company now distributes products through thousands of distribution partners, in more than 70 countries.

Multiquip consists of two divisions, the General Construction Equipment Division and the Power Division. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of New York-based ITOCHU International, Inc. and it’s parent company, Tokyo-based ITOCHU Corporation.

Multiquip distributes well-known brands such as Mikasa, Denyo and Rammax. The company also manufacturers and distributes its own brand of equipment including: MQ Power, Whiteman, Sanders, Mayco, and Essick. Multiquip has a full line of diesel, gasoline and natural gas powered generators as well as an array of portable lighting options for industrial and entertainment applications.

Multiquip Fights Global Recession through IT Transformation with SAP

MANUFACTURING

MultiQuip needed to find an SAP hosting partner they

trusted and a partner that clearly understood there

was no room for error.

The Challenge

In 2008, with the global recession and U.S. housing market showing the largest price drop in history, home and industrial building projects slowed to a crawl, and the construction and power generation industries suffered. In response, Multiquip had to ‘right size’ for their situation which led to fewer resources and smaller budgets.

To make matters even more challenging, the construction equipment market had become quite mature and finding new sales opportunities meant luring customers from Multiquip’s competitors more than relying on growth in the marketplace. The economy was signaling to Multiquip that it was time for a new business strategy. It was up to senior leadership in the company to pull the trigger and initiate a new era in the history of Multiquip. They had to jump start this new era by empowering the company to focus even more attention and resources on efficiency, customer service and customer satisfaction.

A strategic decision was made to outsource their SAP instances to free up resources and place increased emphasis on meeting business objectives rather than on the day-to-day complexities of running SAP. With limited funds, and overworked employees – outsourcing SAP became not only a necessary move to achieve strategic goals, but also a colossal challenge, starting with finding a suitable hosting partner.

Multiquip needed to find a partner they trusted, and a partner that clearly understood there was no room for error in this SAP project. So the challenging search began as Michael Hanken, the VP of Information Technology, was charged with finding a few SAP hosting service providers to evaluate. With little time to spare, he needed to focus on deeply evaluating a select few providers rather than scanning the entire landscape.

The Solution

In 2009, after much consideration and evaluation, Multiquip narrowed the field down to a few high quality SAP-centric hosting companies. Following numerous discussions, several site visits and contract negotiations, Multiquip and Secure-24 became partners.

Michael Hanken and his team now faced a new hurdle – handing over their SAP environment to a third-party provider. For over a decade, Multiquip had managed their own infrastructure in-house, and now outsourcing meant creating new internal roles and responsibilities as well as trusting Secure-24 for the daily maintenance, security and monitoring of their SAP instances.

It was a huge risk to hand over control of a mission-critical system like SAP to a third party; but with excellent communication, talented technical people, dedicated project managers, and mutual trust…the onboarding project was a success.

The Implementation

The onboarding project was successful, but it was not without bumps in the road. Migrating SAP instances from one data center to another data center (2000 miles away) and then doing a cut-over required many pieces to fall exactly into place and several dress rehearsals before attempting the real go-live event.

One of the migration challenges came as a result of the tremendous growth that Secure-24 was experiencing at the same time Multiquip was coming onboard. Due to a large influx of new customers, Secure-24 had to transition some resources from Multiquip and put them on other customers.

This was done with great care, but still disruptions occurred. Michael Hanken reported the problems to Secure-24, and issues were immediately fixed. “Secure-24 didn’t sandbag, they immediately took responsibility for the problem and fixed they it,” said Hanken.

Because Hanken had taken the time to meet the people behind the scenes at Secure-24, he knew the company has both dedicated individuals and a high level of SAP expertise, he just had to make sure the problems were being communicated between the right people in both organizations. Currently the SAP landscape at Multiquip contains the following components:

• 300+ users• Classic 3 tier architecture• Solution Manager• All ECC core modules • Sizeable interface landscape• Heavy leverage of logistic modules including

WMS – RF• Recently upgraded from 4.6c to ECC 6, with

Unicode

In 2010, Multiquip decided they should upgrade SAP from 4.6C to ECC 6. They approached

this upgrade cautiously as they heard many stories from companies who struggled with their upgrades. “We were very cognizant of the problems other companies had upgrading their SAP environments ” says Hanken. However, for Multiquip this upgrade was not only successful, it was award winning. ASUG, the Americas’ SAP User Group, presented Multiquip with their Impact Award for small to medium enterprises at the ASUG Annual Conference in 2011.

According to Bridgette Chambers, ASUG CEO, “We recognize this years Impact Award winners for seamlessly leveraging SAP solutions to maximize service, efficiency and ROI, while simultaneously establishing platforms for future growth.”

Multiquip, a long time SAP customer, was recognized for taking an upgrade path rather than staying with their SAP 4.6c legacy system. Multiquip boldly implemented the new ECC 6.0 system to support and enhance their global expansion, supply chain management, new sales channels, and new reporting requirements.

The upgrade, completed in only 10 weeks, received positive user feedback and allowed the company to scale up and utilize new resources. As a result, Multiquip leadership views SAP upgrades as a business accelerator rather than a costly infrastructure enhancement.

“Recovering from a deep recession demanded our focus on our market strategy, customer service, supplier management and overall efficiency improvements,” said Gary Moskovitz, President and CEO, Multiquip. “Staying on a consistent upgrade path, implementing new solutions and working closely with our partners meant that our SAP solutions have remained relevant to our business strategy and, in fact, have given us greater organizational agility and flexibility.”

And according to Michael Hanken, “the upgrade was much smoother than I ever imagined, it was essentially painless to upgrade.” Since the upgrade took place nearly 2 years ago as of 2013, there haven’t been any related problems.

When asked how they did the upgrade without any serious problems, Hanken cited the following points:

1. Collaboration between Secure-24 and our team to plan out the new landscape

2. Took a very conservative approach3. Upgraded to new Windows OS and MS SQL

versions in the process4. Ran 4.6 for a few months to make sure there

were no technical issues before cutting over5. Migration (1TB) database done over the

weekend6. Used VM landscape for QA and DEV, classic

server clustering for PRD

The benefits were significant: no business downtime, no technical problems, and the users didn’t even realize we were upgraded. Further, there were measurable performance gains, which created instant credibility for the next steps we plan to take, like Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and mobility.

Strategic Benefits

Leveraging a world-class hosting partner like Secure-24 gave Multquip’s IT Department a tremendous opportunity to focus on the major issues facing the company and the resources to explore ways they could meet broader business objectives.

Overall, Multiquip’s ability to service its customers (both internal and external) went up significantly because the SAP systems were performing at a much higher level and the business processes that SAP enabled were running smoother.

To sum up the partnership with Secure-24, Michael Hanken put it succinctly, “we don’t have a line item relationship with Secure-24, we have a partnership in the truest sense of the word, one that extends from the data center to the boardroom.”

Discover more about how Secure-24 can become a highly strategic partner for SAP and learn how Secure-24 is transitioning SAP to the private and hybrid cloud, reducing the complexity of SAP infrastructures and creating greater scalability, flexibility, and manageability.

Secure-24 | 877-724-0365 | info@Secure-24.com | www.Secure-24.com

We don’t have a line item relationship with Secure-24, we have a partnership in the truest sense of the word, one that extends from the data center to the boardroom.

“ “

— Michael Hanken, VP of Information Technology, Multiquip