Modernizing Imperial Dade’s IT Infrastructure, Priming it for Future Growth

To ensure their inventories of constantly used products and supplies are never in danger of being empty, businesses in most industries will often work with a single distributor rather than multiple vendors.

The obvious benefit is the convenience of ordering many items from a single source, but it’s also that most larger distributors such as Imperial Dade, based in Jersey City, NJ, pride themselves on a reliable supply chain that ensures their customers get the products they need, when they need them.

But a supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. An outdated or vulnerable networking infrastructure threatens the ability of the distributor to, well, distribute.

Imperial Dade, a leading distributor of foodservice packaging, chemicals, janitorial supplies, and equipment in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean, serves 80,000 customers and employs 5,000.

As a company in aggressive expansion mode — with nearly four dozen acquisitions since 2007 — it needed an infrastructure that was not only modern but also able to integrate the systems of the companies joining the fold.

Fortunately, Imperial Dade’s IT Director already had a successful partnership with an IT services provider when he worked at his previous company, so he knew whom to call: Data Storage IP, which had proven experience with IBM Power Systems.

Because Data Storage IP takes a personalized approach to every customer, they learned that the true scope of Imperial’s requirements went beyond replacing all their current Power Systems.

As a result, Imperial Dade now has upgraded warehouse management software, in addition to AI-powered distribution and financial software.

With such a large workforce and customer base, the benefits of AI for a distributor like Imperial include:

• Automation to optimize how employees from sales to accounting spend their time
• Analysis and insight to discover new sales and acquisition opportunities
• A better understanding of existing customer behavior to improve the experience, grow sales, and deliver better service

Another major ask was helping Imperial Dade migrate data into the cloud from their on-site production servers to achieve a high availability (HA) architecture.

HA architecture is a must for cloud computing with many users because it provides:

• Redundancy, meaning there are multiple servers with the ability to handle the same tasks. If one server fails, the other servers can handle the load.
• Failover, meaning a secondary server immediately takes over when the primary server goes down.

By implementing a HA architecture, Data Server IP helped Imperial Dade reduce the risk of outages, which could be devastating for a large distributor.

These upgrades and migrations have made Data Storage IP a vital partner as Imperial Dade continues to grow, with greater market share thanks to increased efficiency.

And just as companies rely on Imperial Dade for access to products from multiple brands, Data Storage IP maintains strategic relationship with other IT vendors to ensure a single point of contract for whatever services are needed.

Which is a proven way to distribute connectivity, security, and success.