Creative Fragrances, Ltd.

Prominant perfumery needs updated contingency for business disruption exposure

Solutions:

Many small businesses tend to run an "out of sight, out of mind" playbook when talking about their exposure to business disruption and long term downtime risks. With a digital trifecta of threats, Creative Fragrances, Ltd. was no different. Like many businesses they had ignored their aging technology infrastructure for a number of years and though they had a "tech guy" to fix issues as they arose he was not focused on the larger picture.

In manufacturing as with many operationally intensive businesses there are a lot of moving parts and your ERP system is your lifeline. Collective Technology Group was brought in to assess the current implementation which we were able to sum up with one simple question: "How long can you afford to be down?". Many businesses, even enterprise, do not seriously consider disaster recovery or backup plans until it is too late. Though true redundancy can be cost prohibitive to many, disaster recovery plans do not have to be. Through our assessment we determined that their primary ERP software was missing and they were out side of their licensing / maintenance contract, running on 10 year old hardware with nary a backup in sight! A high risk gamble with 7-10 days of potential downtime is not a position any business owner wants to be in.

To mitigate these risks we focused on the three main components with the highest risk value. Working with the ERP vendor we were able to get support contracts re-established in addition to updated software media. After determining the core requirements of the ERP we replaced the antiquated hardware systems with faster, up to date hardware and warranty protections and devised a simple yet effective backup system that would allow for a DR event without breaking the bank. In all we managed to cut their disruption exposure by about 80% and bring it to a level the client was comfortable with.