Federal Heath Deploys Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced the deployment of Riverbed Steelhead appliances at Federal Heath Sign Company offices across the United States and in Federal Heath’s data center located in Willow Brook, IL.

As a result of its Riverbed WAN optimization deployment, Federal Heath has increased bandwidth capacity by 3x and reduced data traffic by as much as 98 percent during peak periods, resulting in increased application performance over the WAN. With WAN optimization, Federal Heath has improved employee productivity and collaboration, leading to faster customer service.

“We selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances for their ability to increase the performance of our centralized systems.  We now receive unsolicited feedback from employees on how effective the system is in providing faster customer service– a huge improvement from the complaints we were receiving previously,” said Greg Katsaros, IT manager at Federal Heath. “In addition, the Steelhead appliances are easy to deploy into our network and we don’t have to constantly spend time administering them. We now have a happy IT staff, productive employees and satisfied customers.”

Federal Heath provides electric signage, canopy and fascia products, commercial remodeling, nationwide conversions and maintenance services. The company has 450 employees in four manufacturing facilities – located in Oceanside, CA; Delaware, OH; Euless, TX; and Jacksonville, TX – and over 20 sales and maintenance offices throughout the U.S. Federal Heath is a 100 year old company that has been involved in several mergers and acquisitions over the years. As the company integrated operational processes with each merger, the IT team determined that each office and each employee had a different approach to saving critical customer data, which made it difficult to maintain a centralized document management process. The company needed a company-wide system that allowed employees to retrieve accurate customer information quickly, including survey photos, design and engineering drawings, email correspondence, site contracts and legal documents.  

Along the way Federal Heath launched its ‘Lean Concept’ initiative, which encouraged departments to eliminate waste and unnecessary steps. To support the corporate initiative and create a more collaborative environment between its dispersed offices, the three-person IT staff developed a proprietary customer status system (CSS), a project management system that allows salespeople, project managers, designers and estimators, manufacturing plants and customers to exchange information internally over the corporate network or externally over the Web. Orders range from custom signage and corporate IDs to signs for Bed, Bath and Beyond, Chevron, Chili’s, CNN, Countrywide, Harrahs, Volvo and Target.    

“Prior to the development of the CSS, our customer service had been impacted by our inability to quickly access the most accurate information on each client and the resulting difficulty in finding historical information,” said Katsaros. “This made our employees have to perform extra work to recreate design specs and notes that already existed.”

The CSS solved the version control issues but forced bandwidth usage to skyrocket as the company’s use of large files, including AutoCAD and Corel files, PDFs and high-resolution graphics, which can be more than 20 MB in size in some cases, resulted in delays when accessing data from its central data center. As Federal Heath began looking for a solution, Katsaros decided against adding bandwidth, as it was cost-prohibitive and also wouldn’t solve the latency issue. Since the company also had a small IT staff, it needed a solution that was easy to deploy and didn’t require much maintenance once installed.

The Federal Heath IT team decided to deploy WAN optimization technology and selected Riverbed for its ease-of-deployment and simplicity, leading to the deployment of Steelhead appliances. With Riverbed WAN optimization, Federal Heath increased its bandwidth capacity by 3x and reduced data traffic by as much as 98 percent during peak periods. The implementation of WAN optimization helped the company continue to build on its ‘Lean Concept’ initiative to eliminate waste and unnecessary steps.