Case Study

Company: T. Hasegawa USA Inc., Cerritos, California
Product: ABSplus

Background

T. Hasegawa is a mid-size, multinational business specializing in the creation and production of flavors and fragrances for global food and beverage manufacturers. The company has extensive production facilities along with research and development labs in multiple Japanese cities. In the United States, T. Hasegawa has approximately 60 employees, including a 15 person field sales team working out of three locations.

Problem

The major challenge going into this project for the IT department of T. Hasegawa USA was servicing the company's decentralized field sales team. The sales team's portable computers contained business critical data that was not being backed up. IT staff researched for a solution to backup the portable systems remotely, protecting the critical data while sales people were on the road.

Solution

Through testing the CMS Products' ABSplus, T. Hasegawa's IT department determined that the product was the most user-friendly product that met their thorough backup and disaster recovery requirements.

The following table represents the estimated costs T. Hasegawa associated with a loss of data from an individual sales team member. This estimate attempts to incorporate fully burdened labor, subcontractors and equipment costs. Actual costs have not been calculated, and may be different than projected ROI below.

Estimates for salary are: field sales plus commission at $85,000; Tier 1 IT staff at $35, 000 and Tier 2 IT staff at $65,000

Not included in this ROI Estimator:

• Complete loss and replacement of notebook computer.
• Network backup of data does not insure full data protection. Generally, notebook users have additional data outside of the established backup parameters.
• Flexibility and convenience of local data accessibility.
• Benefits of having almost immediate data accessibility and in native file format.

Through this local data storage and backup project, T. Hasegawa has increased its efficiency by reducing an estimated three technical support calls per month to the IT support staff. The estimated savings is $140 per month (based on 4.5 hours of tech support time at $65,000/annum).

Challenges with management included the perception of this project having a low return on investment. However, once the ability to restore user data after a hard drive crash, the cost of entirely replacing a notebook, reduction in repair expense and time-savings were calculated, support was easily gained with executive management.

The deployment of CMS Products' ABSplus allows users to enjoy the security of knowing their data is backed up and available in case of a hard drive failure. This is especially helpful when the salesperson is making a presentation out of the country that may result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. Impact on the users day-to-day routine is negligible; peace of mind and recovery options are priceless.

Summary

Although access and storage of client data is perceived as one of the primary responsibilities of IT staff at T. Hasegawa, the problem of protecting data resources stored on portable computers had not been properly addressed before the implementation of this project. While already providing backup of client data for non-mobile workers, sales teams brought to light the difficulty of backing up their data while on the road. Program costs consisted of $2,400 that was spent on ABSplus systems. Initially it was a challenge to justify spending $2,400 to save $140 per month because it would take the company approximately 2 years to recover the costs. The outcome proved that once factors such as time savings, increased productivity and data protection were considered, the ABSplus provided a positive return on investment to T. Hasegawa.

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