LifeLine Foods is a zero-waste, single-site food and ethanol plant located in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Being a single-site facility, if we go down, there is no backup plan. If we fail, we’re calling our customers and telling them we’re no longer a good partner for them. We have a lot at stake, and our information technology needs to reflect that.
With 750,000 square feet and six different milling units, there are many moving parts in our business that need to be supported by our IT systems. Up until ten years ago, it was costing us exorbitant amounts of money to try and create an expertise in-house that could maintain all these moving parts. This was especially true as we grew. Thankfully, in the last ten years, we’ve migrated from having an on-site IT team to working with TS Conard.
Before connecting with TS Conard, we worked with another third party, but it only created bottlenecks for us. Their approach was to assign a single “jack of all trades” to our account, but it was just too much for one person. They couldn’t always be available, and they didn’t always have the answers we needed. We became very frustrated and bottlenecked.
In 2018, TS Conard reached out offering a solution to our frustration. With much of our technology outdated, we were in a rough situation at the time. Not only were we at risk from a cybersecurity perspective but we were also experiencing excessive amounts of network downtime. Downtime for our facility costs us $20,000 per hour. The stress was causing us to lose sleep at night.
After our previous experience, we were leery of working with another third party and were considering spending the money and bringing our IT back in-house. Tim asked us why we would do that when he had a whole team of specialists behind him that would be far more effective for us than just one person. He told us that every time we had a need, he would provide us with an expert in that area and set us up so that we wouldn’t be beholden to a single person. He then proceeded to perform a risk assessment and put everything into a plan that was digestible for our budget. We saw the value and went for it.
Our company looks completely different now. We sleep at night, we have backups, we have firewalls, and we have somebody that we can call no matter whatÑand that’s saying something as we’re a 24/7 operation. The best part is, nobody really notices technology issues anymore. When we get wind of something, we contact TS Conard and they take care of it right away with no fuss. They are a quiet service provider, and they just make our IT problems disappear while continuing to keep our IT framework reliable and current.
Our advice to any small business would be to not take on your IT in-house. Don’t try to create a generalized expert and don’t burden yourself with the extra payroll when you can work with an IT services provider like TS Conard who has an expert for every problem. The peace of mind alone is worth it.
