FTI Upgrades Quoizel
As a manufacturer and distributor of high-end lighting fixtures, Quoizel (pronounced kwa-zel) has made a very successful business of illuminating the world for 70 years. The business was so successful that the $80 million company, based in Goose Greek, S.C., had outgrown and outpaced its antiquated IT infrastructure. It needed an upgrade – but it did not have to look too far for assistance. Foundation Technologies, Inc. (FTI), a Sun Microsystems reseller based in Greenville, S.C., was ready to shine the light of expertise on Quoizel’s legacy systems.
The company was running its enterprise on an interpretive BASIC application for order-entry and account functions, and a separate inventory-control application. Because the applications weren’t integrated, information had to be entered twice. This system was inefficient and costly. It was also a roadblock on Quoizel’s route to e-commerce.
As a Sun Microsystems Enterprise Elite VAR, FTI had the consultation, design, installation and configuration expertise Quoizel needed. The lighting company’s job specifications called for all its operational applications – accounting, manufacturing, inventory and distribution – to reside in one enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Working with Quoizel’s IT personnel, FTI engineers developed a Sun Microsystems-based solution that brought applications onto one platform and delivered the computing power, administrative ease and expandability the company required.
In the course of the installation, FTI technicians performed various services that drew upon their experience as Sun Microsystems experts. They integrated Quoizel’s existing Intel-based PCs into the Solaris UNIX platform. They also leveraged the flexibility of the Sun Microsystems open-computing environment by integrating third-party hardware and software components. To simplify administration of the new, much-improved IT infrastructure, FTI wrote customized scripts to automate some system functions. And to ensure an extremely satisfied customer, FTI technicians continue to provide dial-up support and performance tuning for Quoizel.
