Introduction
Aqua Leisure is a leading distributor of swimming and water-leisure products and supplies these items to a wide range of companies, including Walmart and Amazon. The company’s products are manufactured and shipped out of China while sales, marketing, engineering, finance, and other core business functions are handled in the United States.
In order to manage and coordinate international operations including inventory, financial transactions, purchase and customer orders, Aqua Leisure launched an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system from Infor SyteLine (also known as CloudSuite Industrial).
Unfortunately, numerous issues relating to speed and reliability arose from the third-party data center that hosted the ERP system. “The response time on the system was really subpar,” said Dennis Colameta, ERP Project Manager for Aqua Leisure. “A user looking to enter or verify an order might have to wait up to five minutes for the system to respond. That’s just too long.”
Aqua Leisure was also limited in visibility and access into its own system. Therefore, whenever a system outage occurred or someone from Aqua Leisure wanted access to the database, there was no option other than to wait for the data center’s support staff to take action.
Outages, performance issues and slow support response times ultimately resulted in low morale towards the ERP system. “You have non-user acceptance of the system,” said Dennis. “End-users become reluctant and non-supportive, and the company has invested a substantial amount of money without return on investment from that perspective.”
“Versetal was able to help us put together the right configuration, run through the right testing, and make all of the necessary tweaks to get us to the performance that we wanted for our users.”
Aqua Leisure needed to find a way to improve upon all of the issues they were experiencing with Infor SyteLine but migrating to an entirely new ERP would be exceedingly difficult and require even more work from their users. In addition to improving performance, Aqua Leisure needed to “win the support of the users so that they felt good about the ERP system that the company spent a lot of money implementing.”
Fortunately, Aqua Leisure found Versetal, which is an SOC 2-compliant organization, INFOR partner, and a Microsoft GOLD partner with expertise in cloud transformations for ERP and homegrown database systems. Versetal had also won the CSO50 Award as one of the top 50 cybersecurity projects in North America for 2020.
Instead of replacing Aqua Leisure’s entire ERP system and suite of business software, Versetal helped to transition hosting for Infor SyteLine to a secure private cloud on Microsoft Azure that Versetal would manage end-to-end. This was achieved with dedicated servers and a custom cloud environment configuration that met all of Aqua Leisure’s workload and security needs.
Versetal organized and managed the entire process of evaluating and preparing the infrastructure dedicated to power Aqua Leisure’s private cloud in order to optimize application performance both domestically and internationally. “The Versetal team did a lot of testing to get the configuration right,” said Dennis.
During the smooth, incident-free migration, Versetal was able to upgrade Aqua Leisure’s applications and database system. Versetal’s dedicated environment allows virtually unlimited flexibility in terms of upgrading or integrating Inforcompatible software. This flexibility also enabled real-time data access for reporting analytics, so that Aqua Leisure now has “access to our data, so we can write programs and extract or update data whenever we need,” said Dennis.
Post-migration, Versetal provides continuous monitoring and resources to minimize outages and security risk. Versetal also stays in close communication with Aqua Leisure to discuss risk factors, new Infor SyteLine projects or software and ways to incorporate any new technologies into Aqua Leisure’s operations to keep them ahead of the curve.
“The Versetal team is very service-oriented, which is what you really need when you’ve outsourced IT to a company,” said Dennis. “They’re just incredibly responsive. I’ve worked with them for the past three years now, and there isn’t any time that I can’t reach somebody.”
The Results
Improved response time from 60–90 seconds to 20 seconds or less
Increased accessibility to company data
Enhanced user adoption, trust, and efficiency
Exceptional ongoing customer support
Expert ERP and technology partnership
