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Prescient Solutions has worked with clients, big and small, from manufacturing to government to education to technology. Following is a snapshot of some challenges we’ve faced and successes we’ve achieved. Select an industry below:

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Manufacturing

Challenge: A global manufacturer with facilities in more than three dozen countries, with tens of thousands of employees, worked as separate operating units. This structure resulted in an array of business practices and technologies.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient analyzed, recommended and rolled out technology.

Results: Prescient streamlined operations and united the organizations distributed business environment.

Challenge: A global manufacturer with hundreds of operations was using outdated and unreliable technology to obtain financial information from all business units, on a monthly basis.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient rewrote the financial reporting system by utilizing the existing database structure while rewriting the application in ASP.NET.

Results: The redeveloped application has increased the system’s scalability and greatly improved its security and robustness. In addition, the new technology has improved the collection of financial information for the corporation, has simplified data entry for the business units and has lowered the support costs for the corporate IT staff.

Challenge: A leading Midwest manufacturer sought to reduce the overall cost of ownership of their internal IT operations, improve internal/external service levels, ensure staff continuity and guarantee 24/7 support. Additionally, the organization wanted to make their business systems more available to workers on the manufacturing floor.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient designed a Wide Area Network and an international Citrix Farm supporting hundreds of users in three different countries, and provided five full-time, on-site consultants responsible for the Helpdesk, network administration and support, WAN management and project management of all data and communications activities.

Results: After outsourcing the entire network and PC support operations to Prescient Solutions, the organizations costs were dramatically reduced and service levels increased.

Challenge: A global manufacturer with facilities in more than three dozen countries, with tens of thousands of employees, worked as separate operating units. This structure created inconsistent business practices and technologies.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient assisted in designing and deploying an enterprise-wide Intranet solution based on Microsoft SharePoint Services.

Results: Today, this Intranet provides synchronous collaboration and communication to thousands of employees worldwide and is a key enabler to internal business process and controls, providing a centralized way of communication in a highly decentralized environment.

Challenge: An international manufacturer client had about 140 companies and service businesses that operate independently within 11 diverse, stand-alone business sectors. Their business model was very decentralized, as well as their IT environment. Prescient Solutions was challenged to strategically develop an infrastructure where the business units could centralized their IT environments, lower IT staff and hardware costs and take advantage of pooled IT support resources based out of their corporate office in Chicago.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient created and implemented a private cloud using HP, Cisco and VMware.

Results: Prescient developed a secure and redundant environment for the business units while engaging in a cost-effective plan for ongoing IT support and services ranging from Level 1 Helpdesk to CIO-level strategic planning. Prescient provided a single point of accountability and overall simplification for the business units’ IT environment.

Emergency Services

Challenge: The Addison Fire Protection District had a communication system between fire stations that was slow. Security was lacking, with insecure Wi-Fi, outdated firewall rules, and weak password policies. There were hardware problems, including servers and power supplies that were dead. Nothing was backed up.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient Solutions provided a full-time, on-site IT consultant who upgraded the entire IT infrastructure to modern technology, including a robust backup procedure using cloud storage.

Result: Instead of a single employee with limited knowledge, they have access to all the knowledge of all the Prescient Solutions consultants.

Challenge: A large consolidated 911 center was using a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system that lacked disaster recovery capabilities. The 911 center desired a system that would quickly recover from a physical server failure or a building evacuation scenario

Prescient Solutions: Duplicate CAD servers were purchased and deployed at two different 911 centers. Additionally, software was configured to synchronize data between the two CAD servers in real time. Each 911 center operates off their local CAD server under normal conditions. In the event of a disaster, the 911 center would operate off the functioning remote CAD server with their own data and configuration.

Result: The solution has been tested on numerous occasions and has worked as designed. The client is confident that they have a continuation of operations in the event of a failure, critical to providing emergency services to a large population.

Challenge: A governmental emergency system had gathered a significant amount of data and developed business processes around that data. The data needed to be collected from an array of individuals around the state, managed and maintained over time.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient was able to distill down and decipher the “big picture” of the data and processes. Prescient consolidated three separate public websites into a single online portal that required content approval before changes were made public. Additionally, Prescient created a single online, self-service secure portal (extranet) commonly referred to as CIMS (Contact Information Management System).

Result: This solution enabled the client to audit content management and ensure proper procedures were being followed. The CIMS consolidated multiple databases and documents and enabled the client to delegate control to the individuals who are best qualified to report on the information. Not only does the solution reduce overall costs of doing business, the client now has the ability to control, audit and electronically process critical information vital to emergency responders for the state. Since then, numerous state agencies have decided to adopt a similar (if not the same) model for managing similar resources.

Distribution

Challenge: A leading food service distributor to restaurants, health care and hospitality facilities, government operations and educational institutions needed to upgrade its order entry software from the legacy DOS environment to Windows to support the 10,000+ users.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient reviewed business practices and wrote and deployed the custom application used by thousands of customers across the country.

Result: The application is used to process billions of dollars of orders each year. This project was completed on time and within budget.

Education

Challenge: A suburban high school with thousands of students and faculty staff was faced with significant connectivity issues causing regular disruptions for students and teachers. IT staff was not adequately prepared to support the maintenance for the Cisco Gigabit and Wireless infrastructures. Additionally, the in-house IT staff had no experience in Cisco IP Telephony or the school administration application, making it impossible to complete the necessary day-to-day administration and support.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient supports the school with all IT needs, including the development of custom reporting.

 Result: Within the first two weeks of the project, Prescient was able to re-configure the wireless network infrastructure and eliminate 100 percent of all wireless issues. Additionally, within the first month, Prescient was able to close all 250 outstanding trouble tickets for servers, PCs and applications.

Challenge: A community school district requested our services to determine the cause of the Local Area and Wide Area Network connectivity and latency issues.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient found that the cable network infrastructure was improperly configured and also suggested the implementation of new network switching devices within the district facilities. Prescient installed and configured new cable network devices to fully segment the district WAN from other township network devices.

  Result: Prescient reconstructed the district network to use more efficient protocols, eliminating unnecessary network broadcasts and inefficiencies. Finally, Prescient designed, configured and installed new network infrastructure switching devices in all district facilities to increase the efficiencies of local network traffic.

“We had concerns about the stability and security of our network. Prescient came in and through their audit identified many weaknesses that we weren’t aware of. They gave our whole system a much-needed overhaul and provided value above and beyond the scope of the contract. That’s what I appreciate the most. They go the extra mile but don’t charge us for every little thing. We are extremely satisfied.”

Education, Associate Superintendent

Food Industry

Challenge: A food service manufacturing company was keeping paper logs for the status and current state of five production machines. The data was written on paper and entered into a spreadsheet on a weekly basis, wasting a significant amount of time. The client wanted to institute an electronic system for tracking this data with the ability to create custom views and reports.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient Solutions used SharePoint as an electronic form for machine operators to use on the floor through the use of tablet PCs. Prescient gave the management team the ability to track the machine status while building error checking into the form for machine validation. Through SharePoint and SQL reporting services, there are customizable views and reports that can be generated to track and present the data in any way required. The client management team also has the ability for electronic approvals of any of the forms entered.

Result: The users and management team are very satisfied with the results. The solution is much more efficient for all users and the reporting capabilities surpass what was used in the past. As a result of this implementation, the client requested that Prescient use electronic forms in other areas of their environment to cut down on the use of paper forms and wasted resources.

Technology

Challenge: A county used technology, designed for fault tolerance, for the majority of its 911 services. However, the remainder of the systems did not share the same stability characteristic.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient recommended and led the installation of a fully-redundant, chassis-based network switch, along with the implementation of a Blade Server system. Using clustering and continuous data protection technologies, the systems have the ability to support all county users. Additionally, Prescient provides day-to-day Helpdesk, server administration and network infrastructure administration. Prescient also provides support and configuration of communications equipment for the county public safety vehicles.

Result: Prescient designed the systems to provide load balancing for the increased growth projected.

Nonprofit

Challenge: The Academy requested proposals from qualified, professional technology vendors for Information Technology Support Services to provide technical support, assistance, hardware and software troubleshooting, network and system maintenance, and training and documentation of Academy hardware and software inventory.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient came on board in 2014. They reviewed the inventory, assessed system architecture and equipment for efficiency, made recommendations for improving routine support criteria, and eliminating emergency maintenance situations. The team defined and eliminated security holes and vulnerabilities by implementing automated systems to monitor, scan, update, and report on Academy’s entire IT infrastructure and systems.

Results: Since 2014, the Prescient Solutions team has efficiently and effectively managed the Academy’s Information Technology services. The team provides desktop support, server and workstation services, network administration services, email security, and back up.

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Challenge: Aspire’s previous IT partner was responsible for a plethora of systems including aging server hardware, antiquated camera systems, and confidential patient data. However, their deployed strategies were not optimal for efficiency, nor did they line up with industry standard best practices.

Prescient Solutions: Prescient Solutions had to rebuild the entire IT infrastructure from the core. From security cameras, access control systems, and building alarms, to network upgrades, docking stations, and hardware service contracts, Prescient built an environment that was optimized both internally and externally.

Results: Prescient Solutions brought structure, best practices, and decades of experience to an organization in despair. This structure unified many IT systems and processes while increasing reliability and decreasing costs.

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