Customer:  ULTA Beauty

Industry:  Retail

Project:  Custom Server Cabinets

1,400+ custom-designed, fully-sourced, built, pre-populated, packaged & delivered server cabinets

The Challenge:  Manage a custom project end-to-end

Toward the end of 2011 a sales inquiry came in for 1,000 server cabinets. The customer asked two questions. How long will it take you to produce and deliver 1,000 server cabinets? How much per cabinet? The sales team quarried for more information and learned the customer was at the beginning of what was to be a long and detailed network infrastructure deployment project. The project was to roll out a completely new and improved solution to nearly 1,400+ store locations across the country. Having had success in similar projects in the past, the sales team knew how to best approach and position Kendall Howard as a more complete solution using value added services. Once the customer defined the equipment being mounted inside of the server cabinet, Kendall Howard took a look at sourcing some of the items. Items such as patch panels, cable managers, power strips were easily sourced through a wide network of top network and IT distributors. Kendall Howard was able to source a handful of items and pre-populate the server racks following the customer’s installation diagram before the racks ship to each individual location. Over the last six years, Kendall Howard has managed the purchasing, inventory and deployment management of this project.

Solution Type:  Rack and stack deployment

• Customer required the same technology solution be deployed and installed at each of their 1,500+ locations.
• In an effort to reduce overall ship cost and installation labor costs onsite, Kendall Howard took on the pre-installation of components into the rack before it shipped to the site. This reduced the number of packages being delivered and better insured necessary components to complete the work were onsite at the right time.
• An inventory management program for all supplied components being pre-installed in the cabinet was created.
• A managed deployment schedule is collaboratively worked on between all suppliers to better insure products are delivered on time.