About OfficeMax

OfficeMax is one of Australia’s largest and fastest growing providers of office solutions for commercial, education and government customers. They offer a wide range of office products, stationery, furniture, technology and education supplies.

The Challenge:

“We simply can’t afford downtime”

OfficeMax processes and fulfils a huge range and high volume of office product orders across Australia and New Zealand every day.

To achieve this, they rely heavily on their mission-critical PRONTO ERP system running on a combination of IBM pSeries, TotalStorage and TSM infrastructure. From sales ordering and inventory control to administration and financial management, this system powers all their major business operations. If it crashes, so does OfficeMax’s ability to operate.

“We process a very high volume of transactions every day. The systems are busy and running six days a week, 20 hours a day. We simply can’t afford downtime as we’d virtually come to a standstill,’ says Justin Hansen, OfficeMax’s IT Manager.

Plus, with strict service level agreements in place for their major government and corporate customers, even a short amount of downtime can have serious commercial consequences.

To help protect and streamline their IBM Enterprise infrastructure, OfficeMax needed an experienced partner they could trust to monitor, support, manage and backup these systems to prevent problems occurring as well as being ready to respond immediately in the event of a failure or disaster.

The solution

“The TRT Managed Service model just works”

While an in-house solution was considered carefully, OfficeMax quickly reached the conclusion that a managed service made more sense for their business.

With a shortage of Enterprise IT systems administrators across the IT industry, quality cross trained IBM AIX, TotalStorage and TSM specialists are difficult to attract and retain for SME's like OfficeMax.

“If we were to manage the system in-house we’d need to rely heavily on just one or two AIX specialists. This also presents the risk of having a single point of failure if staff move on, taking their in-depth knowledge of our system with them,” continued Hansen.

In 2003, OfficeMax selected TRT’s Managed Services to manage the AIX/UNIX environment which runs their mission-critical ERP systems.

In addition to experienced IBM specialist, the solution includes dedicated account management, 24/7 technical support, real time monitoring, proactive reporting, proactive system health checks and a disaster recovery module.

The benefits:

“It’s efficient, cost-effective and much lower risk”

By defining the business requirements, implementing an appropriate solution and providing ongoing maintenance, TRT Managed Services has helped take the stress, risk and complexity out of managing OfficeMax’s business-critical IT systems.

While OfficeMax retains complete control over their systems, TRT takes accountability for keeping the environment running efficiently and securely.

TRT took responsibility for managing the environment in 2003 and Hansen has been very impressed with the results.

“The TRT Managed Service model just works. It’s efficient, cost-effective and much lower risk... perfect for what we need. TRT has also carefully documented our systems and has multiple engineers that know our infrastructure intimately. This means we’re not reliant on one or two in-house resources.”

“The service includes eyes on our system 24/7 with reporting back to us if any potential issues come up. With our heavy reliance on technology, this level of service is critical.”

OfficeMax also utilises TRT’s cold site disaster recovery service and is currently developing a hot site solution to provide OfficeMax’s users the highest level of business continuity and disaster recovery for their mission-critical systems.