No matter what type of IT department you run, if you have numerous plants in over 20 states ranging from New Mexico to New York, you need to have a properly built network infrastructure. Anything less and you're flirting with disaster.

Due to the nature of its business-recycling restaurant grease and animal byproducts-the 25 processing and transfer facilities of Valley Proteins are often in remote locations. It's because of the remoteness of these facilities that network connectivity is often an issue.

When networks aren't talking to one another, it can lead to a host of different tech issues. And that can lead to confusion and ultimately 25 different facilities pulling in 25 directions-all with different results.

Valley Proteins understood that they had a cohesion problem amongst its business divisions and decided to implement SAP as a way of getting a holistic view of customer profitability, supplier pricing and individual factory performance. But before the SAP solution could be put into place, it was important that the more than two dozen facilities needed to get under the same network umbrella. If that didn't happen, this endeavor was going to be a failure.

Valley Proteins turned to Cisco to come up with a reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure.

Cisco went into Valley Protein's existing data centers and created an entirely new infrastructure by installing Cisco servers, switches, routers and firewalls. In addition, access points were placed at all of the facilities allowing for the business data and operations to be centralized.

This new Cisco infrastructure has worked out very well for Valley Proteins and has allowed for:

• Improved profitability
• Real-time visibility
• Modular scalability
• Better customer service
• Business continuity

These infrastructure benefits have impacted Valley Proteins for the better and have allowed day-to-day operations to run much smoother.

"We can make better business decisions without employing an army of analysts," says Brad Wilton, Director of IT.

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