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.
| Complete data loss without backup |
| Data recreation (20 hours) |
$820 |
| Loss of productivity (26 hours [includes shipping time]) |
$1063 |
| IT Incident response (Tier
2 call center & onsite, 1.5 hours) |
$47 |
| Total Cost |
$1930 |
| Complete data loss with
recovery |
| Data recreation (1 hour) |
$41 |
| Loss of productivity (1 hour) |
$41 |
| IT Incident response (Tier
1 call center only, 1 hour) |
$17 |
| Cost of CMS' ABSplus |
$300 |
| Cost of installation and annual management (.25hr/month) |
$123 |
| Total Cost |
$522 |
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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