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Revamping IT
After a year of consulting, BD offered Dees a job as director of MIS, reporting to CFO Carlson. He spent most of the next year learning what BD needed and trying to formulate his IT vision for the company, which in 2006 had grown to include the factory in China. In two years, Dees increased the staff from three to 12 and more than tripled the budget.
"It was a classical open source, mixed-bag environment," he says. "Linux Red Hat, app server, Windows 2000 servers. Disparate apps. It was clearly one of those shops that had been built on minimizing costs. But well done. Most everything was done in-house. We've switched to a model where we'll buy it and bring it in."
Before long, Dees was VP of MIS, reporting to the CEO. One of his first tasks was to integrate IT into the running of the business.
"We're not the three guys who never come out of the room anymore," he says. "We're part of the organization, trying to accomplish strategic goals. There's a definite transition in how IS behaves. We were the guys you didn't need until things went bad. Now we're consulted when the business has a desire to move in a certain way. Our opinion is requested at every strategic decision."
Another of his early priorities was to beef up the company's infrastructure, including networking. In 2006 BD rolled out a virtual private network (VPN).
"There are integration issues with our three offices," Dees says. "We didn't have a wide area network [WAN]. Now we have a global WAN that makes three offices feel like one entity. That was a prerequisite for a lot of other things to work, like our PLM. We looked at point-to-point circuits and MPLS. The decision was made to roll our own site-to-site VPN on Cisco. It was very cost effective."
Dees hired MIS mangers in Europe and China and holds weekly teleconferences with both. Each location has its own version of the Navision ERP system, although Dees plans to eventually put the company on a single platform. The China site, for example, still uses spreadsheets for human resources.
"Next year they won't. That begs for a SOA," Dees says. "A sales and marketing office can run autonomously. But when you open a manufacturing plant, the relationship has to be more tightly knit if you want it to be as good as [that with] the plant 200 feet away. Now it's a global entity that has to work like an enterprise."
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