The Solution
According to the company, an appealing component to the VAI S2K ERP solution was that it had a balance between both distribution and manufacturing capabilities. Said Vishnu Banka, VP of Finance and IT at Dickson Furniture, “Most of the other software that we looked at was either focused more on distribution or on manufacturing. We needed both and VAI gave us what we needed. We really didn't need something complex because our processes are not very complex.”

There are multiple reasons the company chose to migrate to VAI Cloud, including the elimination of an in-house IT department. “We leave it to the experts to manage our hardware, software, the backup, and everything else,” continued Banka. “We don't need to worry about adding more hardware as we grow. VAI Cloud gives us agility and the speed to grow, and there’s no need to worry about infrastructure.”

Banka shared that running VAI S2K software in the cloud is more economical because the company does need to spend upfront costs on hardware or software licensing because that comes with the cloud. With VAI Cloud, the Dickson team can better focus on managing the business.

“Another reason for moving to VAI Cloud was because we wanted to implement VAI S2K Enterprise Portal,” said Banka. “We had to decide whether to buy more hardware and then host the portal solution within the company with S2K Enterprise ERP, or host both at VAI facilities.” The company decided on the latter and went with VAI Cloud for the portal and S2K Enterprise ERP solution. The Dickson team is confident knowing that whenever a customer visits their portal, the system is up and running and there's no downtime.

“The way VAI managed the transition to Cloud was great,” shared Banka. “We closed our business one Friday evening during normal business hours, and FedEx'd our backup tape to VAI. They restored the backup over the weekend. The following Monday morning, we were able to log onto the servers located in New York and start work without losing any business time. VAI did a great job in getting that up and running for us.”

When Dickson migrated to VAI Cloud, they built redundancies in their systems, in terms of hiring dual firewalls and having bandwidth. They spent a good deal of time before going live on VAI Cloud to check the connectivity and speed with VAI along with communication breaks. They moved to a metro ethernet to ensure that there's no issues.

The Result
“We never had an issue after we went live, there was no need for us to use our redundancies so far, but it’s better to have redundancies in the system, just in case something breaks,” said Vishnu Banka, VP Finance and IT at Dickson Furniture. “Once we moved to the VAI Cloud, the biggest benefit that I see that I'm having today is that I'm not worried about what's happening to my hardware here.”

The company added VAI’s portal application which runs in the cloud. Banka concludes that he’s not concerned about server issues, such as taking backups and ensuring it's up to date or getting security and anti-virus updates. “VAI Cloud makes it easier for me to look at different processes that I need to get into place, more than worry about, hey, will my hardware be able to do that?”

Since the launch, Dickson Furniture has been using VAI’s ERP software to:

• Manage all sides of the business with manufacturing and distribution applications
• Save on cost with VAI Cloud technology
• Better focus on managing the business
• Experience no downtime