About Palmer Trucks
Palmer Trucks is a full-service Kenworth dealership network serving Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois with a comprehensive package of products and services. As a family-owned business with more than a half-century history of growth and success, Palmer Trucks has grown to a team of more than 600 individuals.
The Challenge
Palmer Trucks had been operating with DSI’s business management software for over two decades. When browser-based Blaze came along, the firm’s managers saw an opportunity to stop managing servers and refocus on operations by moving to the cloud.
“This was a planned change to take advantage of greater reliability and stronger backups in the cloud,” says Jeff Gauger, Controller and IT Manager at Palmer Trucks in Indianapolis. “We were adding a new location and it made sense to move to the cloud at the same time.”
The Solution
The switchover from DSI Classic to Blaze was easy. It was done on a Sunday, the least busy day of the week for the dealership. The company was offline for just four hours, and only a few entries had to be made once Blaze was online.
The Results
According to Gauger, Palmer has seen numerous benefits since switching to Blaze, including:
- Greater uptime and faster restores. Cloud hosting with DSI virtually never goes down. Before the change, if Palmer had a server fail, it would take four to eight hours to restore data from a backup server.
- Automatic backups. Palmer previously backed up once daily, meaning that a whole day of data could potentially be lost in a server crash. Now backups are automatic, reducing recovery point objectives from one day to just minutes.
- High availability and business continuity. Palmer’s 18 locations can access their data independently through the cloud, so that if one dealership loses power or internet it does not affect the others. When the company had its own servers, if the main office went down it put all the other facilities offline as well.
- Faster performance. With the switch to the Blaze program and cloud hosting, Gauger has found that the system runs much faster. Previously, generating reports took over an hour; now they run in less than 10 minutes.
- Improved responsiveness. Palmer’s managers also appreciate being able to access their data from their phone or home computer if they need to respond quickly to a customer inquiry.
Palmer also uses DSI’s archiving service in the cloud. This allows employees to instantly search for invoices and other documents back to 2004. “It’s easier to use than the third-party software that we had before,” Gauger says.
Craig Barnard, IT Manager, adds, “The only thing I have to say is that I wish we would have made the switch to cloud hosting sooner.”