Challenge

Amidst the pandemic, the community’s need for their service expanded quickly. They have been forced to expand their and emergency response in ways they had never imagined.  This organization had to balance ramping up their operations while practicing social distancing and transitioning some staff to working from home. This organization wanted to meet the growing needs of their community, but had a few technical challenges to work through.  

One huge challenge for this organization was the lack of WiFi in parts of their warehouse. This made it difficult for warehouse staff to maintain a connection to the WiFi while performing vital functions. If the WiFi connection dropped in the middle of a distribution order, the data about those food products would be lost and the process would have to start over. They would also have trouble uploading donation receipts and would have to wait until they were connected to the server. Employees using iPads would sometimes have to physically go back and forth between the warehouse, where they were gathering data, and the office, where they could connect reliably to WiFi to complete business-critical tasks. All of these issues created huge inefficiencies for the team.  

Additionally, the server this organization was using was coming to its end of life. They needed to migrate their essential inventory management platform to a new server with as little disruption to their operation as possible. This platform connects to the iPads in the distribution locations and is essential to their success.  

A program that had traditionally been an in-person educational course for single mothers needed to be transitioned to virtual. The team at this firm was unable to handle all aspects of this transition.  

Solution

GadellNet’s team installed two wireless access points in their warehouse. These access points were strategically placed in order to give the team full connection in all areas of the warehouse. This allowed the nonprofit to expand their business operations more fully to their warehouse facility. Efficiencies were created, with much less physical need to go back and forth to the office to connect to WiFi and it streamlined their work. There was no more waiting to connect to a server to get their donors their receipts and no more double work if the connection dropped in the middle of an order.  

To solve the issue with the server and migration, GadellNet created a new server for this organization. Migrating the application took a lot of coordination. GadellNet had to coordinate with the client and the vendor. The planning was well worth it, as the blackout of the application to migrate was contained to a single, planned afternoon. There was minimal disruption to the client.  

In order to help keep the educational program for single mothers underway, GadellNet created forms for the mothers to sign up and set them up with video chat. GadellNet also sourced Chromebooks for these “Momvocates” to make sure they were able to get the education they wanted.