Missing Links

Is your computer setup getting to be a royal pain in the you-know-what? Choosing the right network may be the most important technology decision you make.

Shop Talk: CEOs search for the right technology

Choosing the right network may be the most important technology decision you make

Royal Construction's computer setup was getting to be a royal pain in the you-know-what. In the spring of 1998, the $4-million company, which is based in Eau Claire, Wis., had strung together its three computers and a printer in a Microsoft Windows "peer-to-peer" network -- an arrangement whereby each device was connected to the next by a cable. The design was supposed to enable each user to view files on the others' hard drives and to print documents from his or her desk. But after six months, the system still wasn't working properly, so the staff returned to its old system, a "sneaker net," copying the desired file onto a diskette and running it over to the one computer that was connected directly to the printer. Even more of a nuisance to Royal Construction's owner and CEO, Tim Pabich, was what he had to go through to check on the status of an account. "I'd have to ask Cheryl, our bookkeeper, to check for me," he says, noting that the account files resided on her hard drive. "She'd then have to print all that out, or I'd have to go look at her screen."

Something had to be done -- and Pabich didn't feel that it was fair to ask the company's regular IT troubleshooter, a friend of his, to take on such a big project. So instead the CEO grilled his colleagues and combed through the yellow pages in search of networking consultants. The few who seemed appropriate were brought into the office. "I basically threw my hands up in the air and asked them, 'What do I need? What hardware? What software? Do we need to start over?' " says Pabich.

He ultimately went with a small-business reseller called Computer Business Solutions (CBS), which is also based in Eau Claire. The reason? The CEO felt that CBS was the only consultant that took the time to understand his situation by asking him about things like the type of software he was running and his plans for the future. "The others just were not asking me questions about how much I knew or what my needs were," recalls Pabich.

Pabich also appreciated the way CBS network specialist Dan Gharrity helped him increase his knowledge about Royal Construction's needs so that he could evaluate the consultants' proposals better. Gharrity pointed out how relevant Royal Construction's growth plans were to the selection of a network, for example. And whereas proposals from other consultants consisted of a laundry list of applications with a lump-sum price tag, Gharrity's provided individual price breakouts and indications of which applications were essential and which were of the "wish list" variety and could be implemented later.

Gharrity created a three-step plan. First, he upgraded the computers' operating system, replacing the old Microsoft Windows 3.1 with Windows 95. He also exchanged the bookkeeper's Pentium 100MHz computer for a more robust Pentium II 266MHz model. Since the company's most important data were stored on the bookkeeper's hard drive, it was crucial that her computer be more powerful than the others.

Second, he replaced the varied generic network cards in the computers with 3Com cards. In order to be linked together with cables, computers must have network cards inside them. And brand homogenization would simplify the maintenance of the system by making it much easier to troubleshoot problems. Error codes would be consistent across the system, for example, rather than a jumble of numbers that took time to decipher.

And third, Gharrity changed the "topology," or design, of the network from a ring configuration to a star configuration. While a ring design is fine for a small network and has the added benefit of being less expensive to implement because of lower cabling costs, it's more vulnerable to crashes. Like a string of Christmas-tree lights, computers and other devices in a ring configuration are dependent on one another: if one locks up, the entire network goes down. In a star topology, on the other hand, each device is connected to a central piece of equipment called a hub. If a cable connecting a particular device to the hub is damaged or somehow incapacitated, then only that device is affected. Gharrity started Royal Construction with a four-port hub, which allows up to four devices to be linked in the network.

About two weeks after CBS had come to the rescue, Royal Construction's new network was up and running. Pabich was ecstatic about the time it was saving him. "I could now do my own editing of estimates," he says. "In the past, we had to pass hard copies with my handwritten comments on them back and forth three times." And the star design, with its resistance to breakdowns and its faster transmissions, not only kept the network up and running but also allowed users to open and use files much more quickly -- benefits that enabled Pabich to finally use Timberline's Gold Collection, an accounting package designed specifically for the construction industry.

Sure, there were some glitches in the plan's implementation. For one, a miscommunication led to Pabich's purchasing a Hewlett-Packard printer that was incompatible with the new network. With some configuring, Gharrity did get it to work, but he replaced it as soon as he could with an Okidata printer. "I've learned it's not going to run smoothly right away," says Pabich. "I remember being pretty frustrated as we switched to this new system. But Dan was very responsive as we got the bugs worked out." In the end, the pain and the $13,000 investment were worth it. "We can probably now handle 25% to 30% more jobs with the same number of people," says Pabich.

GOT BUGS? TRY RAID
As the superstition goes, if you break a mirror, you're in for seven years of bad luck. For Kirkegaard & Associates, a $2.8-million architectural-acoustics consulting company based in Chicago, a "broken" mirrored hard drive on its server resulted in bad luck of a more concentrated variety: a network shutdown and a bill for $7,000. The price tag included some $5,800 in consulting fees to diagnose and fix the mirroring (a setup in which any action taken on a file on one hard drive -- whether it's created, changed, or deleted -- is simultaneously replicated on another drive) and, finally, $1,200 for a new mirrored hard drive and other parts.

But those numbers don't begin to reflect the loss in productivity that Kirkegaard & Associates experienced. "When the system was down, we had to resort to faxing clients instead of using E-mail," says founder and president R. Lawrence Kirkegaard. "Also, our employees had to go to the office's backup tape to retrieve the files they were working on. That all worked, but it increased the time it took to get the work done."

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