K&S Freighters provides road, rail and coastal sea forwarding in support of full and break bulk loads, including export packing, wharf lodgement and the delivery of integrated supply chain and systems solutions. They control over 160,000m2 of warehousing and numerous rail and sea containers, and manage one of the largest company owned and operated logistics fleets in Australia. K&S Freighters also provides specific support to offshore exploration and drilling projects through its Portland logistics supply base, which supports major Bass Strait and Otway Basin projects.
Challenge
Running a business of this size and nature, which operates on stringent daily itineraries and deadlines, requires IT systems that can keep up with the pace of the industry. As such, K&S Freighters required a more cost-effective hardware and network support solution that delivered quicker response times than their previous supplier.
Mark Makies, Infrastructure Manager at K&S Freighters is responsible for ensuring these storage systems and critical business data are available around the clock. He was looking for a more cost-effective hardware and network support solution that also delivered faster.
“Data is everything to us. If our IT systems fail, or a disaster occurs that affects access to these systems, our business suffers,” explained Makies. “Everything is planned the day prior to a delivery and while the trucks can still move if our IT systems go down, critical data needs to be recorded for each transfer and any loss of this information could be detrimental to all of our processes along the way,” he added.
Mark found this in a tailored hardware maintenance agreement with Interactive, one of Australia’s leading IT services companies, which provides support to 60 of K&S Freighters’ servers across Australia at a significant cost saving.
"We were impressed with how Interactive understood our business, and they immediately came to us with a better service level agreement than our previous maintenance provider. We went from a 24 hour turnaround time, to two hours, and at half the cost! "
Solution
Interactive reduced K&S Freighters’ maintenance response time from 24 hours to two hours at a reduced cost from their previous supplier.
Interactive provided a business continuity solution that gives the company the confidence its business will be back online within 12 hours and all core systems available within two hours. In addition, co-locating all its data in Interactive’s data centre, K&S Freighters also has access to firewall equipment and three cold servers which would be put into use if a disaster was declared. This has been tested on three occasions with complete success.
“Working with Interactive has been trouble free and a smooth journey. With previous providers, the relationship has been difficult and I could never find anyone to talk to when we had a problem. With Interactive, I feel like they are an extension of our business and their response times are incredible,” he said.
