Oreck's disaster plan called for replacing the destroyed T1 lines with ISDN connections, although it turned out that only one of the company's business partners had the capability to switch telephony systems. So instead, Evanson decided to go with a virtual private network -- a technology no one on his staff had any experience with. Nevertheless, the Boulder data center was soon communicating with the rest of the business. Evanson then dispatched a team to New Orleans to truck the company's servers to Dallas, where they were bridged into the data center, effectively recreating the company's network a week after Katrina struck.
"Bringing up a system doesn't do any good if no one can connect to it," Evanson says.
But Oreck was still severely handicapped. The flooding in New Orleans took out the local service provider hosting Oreck's e-commerce and POS systems -- as well as that company's backup facilities. Evanson hired another service provider to put up a simple Web site available at the old URL that directed customers to Oreck's 500 retail locations. Oreck stores reverted to paper, handwriting receipts for customers. Paragon, a small software firm, later furnished Oreck with a Web-based POS application.
"The least damaged channel was retail, so we pushed customers through there," Evanson says.
Getting vacuum cleaners to customers was another matter. Oreck soon made a deal with UPS to handle its distribution from UPS' Atlanta hub. UPS would truck food and water down to Long Beach and return to Atlanta with vacuums, which it would then distribute for the company. This meant connecting UPS to Oreck's data center in Boulder and training its personnel in how to navigate the company's arcane and laborious supply chain software: old and heavily customized versions of Assist Cornerstone and MacPro.
In those first two frantic weeks, Oreck had been able to reach only about half of its 500 factory workers. Paying them was another challenge, since work records were on the servers at the Long Beach plant. Evanson sent a team to bring the boxes back to Dallas, buying two seats on a plane for the servers. "We didn't miss payroll," Evanson says.
On Friday, Sept. 9, Tom Oreck flew his plane down to the plant to celebrate the reopening of the factory with a barbecue. Two out of five production lines went live that day.
