PMF Improves Technology Infrastructure
Company Name: PMF Industries, Inc.
City, State: Williamsport, PA
Industry: 34 - Fabricated Metal Products
Type of Assistance: Information Technology Assistance
Year of Study: 2001
Company Profile: Precision Metal Forming (PMF) Industries, Inc. is a manufacturer of pressure vessels and stainless steel products. The primary focus at PMF is the flow forming of stainless and heat resistant steels and other exotic metals. PMF also offers tooling, presswork, machining, welding, finishing and assembly to its customers.
Situation: PMF was facing many difficulties with their installed computer system. Their server would lock up several times every week, which caused a tremendous amount of downtime and productivity losses.
The problems were more serious than most due to heavy computerization of the company's manufacturing processes. All of the scheduling, job tracking and time reporting are fed to the shop floor via numerous workstations in the plant. The company was also running a Token Ring network that was also suspect to problems.
Solution: The IMC executed three Information Technology projects to solve PMF's problems. The first was our standard Level 1 Assessment and LAN Design project. The second was a LAN Implementation in which IMC installed two new Windows 2000 Compaq servers to replace their ailing generic server. The third project was an Enterprise Wiring Upgrade, which replaced all of their current cabling with CAT7 cabling. As part of this project, we changed their 16MB Token Ring Topology to a 100/1000 MB Ethernet. They have two wiring closets linked by fiber optic cable. The servers now have 1 GB Ethernet cards in them and the fiber backbone is also running at 1GB.
Results: Since completion of the projects, the network has not gone down once and the speed of the company's system has dramatically increased. Downtime has decreased.
“We are extremely pleased with the IMC's assistance. IMC did a great job in upgrading the company's computer system. For the first time, PMF's computer system had not crashed for an entire month, which was a tremendous improvement from before.”
Don Alsted, President