The day Stylus Stationers old systems crashed
Introduction
Office Power helps many dealers transition on to the Office Power platform with ease. We take a hands-on approach and our team support dealers through the process over an eight week period to ensure all systems are working well and to make sure dealers feel comfortable with the system.
But there was one occasion when this part of the journey was sped up and condensed down into less than a week.
Nick Bugden of Stylus Stationers shares his story about the fatal day when his old system ground to a halt and what happened next.
Monday 24 April 2016
“The morning of Monday 25 April 2016 started out as a normal day at Stylus, no different from any other day.
Suddenly and without warning, the reassuring quiet hum of the MicroVAX computer running our bespoke sales order Processing system started to change in tone and pitch until it became an ominous metallic whine, audible throughout the office.
For the first time since we went live on the system, back in January 1992, errors started to appear on people’s screens…
The whine reached a screaming crescendo and with a sound like an angle-grinder being applied to rusty metal, the hard disk died.
At that moment, I knew instinctively that nothing would ever be the same at Stylus, ever again.”
The aftermath
“It got worse… The bank of backup disk drives containing all of our data generated an unknown hardware error message when I tried to connect them to our standby machine. This had become a catastrophe.
After trying many times and failing to locate the meaning of the unusual error code, at 11:23 that morning I phoned Kathy:
Nick: “Kath, the worst has happened, we’ve lost it completely…”
Kath: “oh… bloody hell”
By 14:00 I had spoken with Office Power several times and they were putting together a plan to go live as soon as possible.
Like a well-maintained machine clicking smoothly into a higher gear, the onboarding team at Office Power were going that extra mile to help us in our hour of greatest need.
My big problem was that we still needed to invoice all of the transactions that had been lost as a result of the crash.
I spent that night and following 2 nights in a lonely vigil creating a working system from text backups of the 300+ modules of source code that I had to load onto our standby computer.
I was up against a tight deadline as I was due to fly out to Tuscany on Thursday 28th for a long-standing engagement that I had to keep, as badly-timed as it was.
True to their promise, the Office Power onboarding team managed all aspects of the expedited going live and implementation of the new Stylus Office Power website, so that everything was ready for the big switch-over by the morning of Wednesday 27th.
The following morning I flew out to Italy, safe in the knowledge that everything was under control and that a member of the OP team was sitting in the Stylus office, ensuring that things ran smoothly.
Whilst in Tuscany, I was able to check progress and performance on my iPad from the OP dashboard while I reflected on everything that had happened and just how fortunate we had been to have been in such good hands.”
To find out more about Office Power and how it could help make your business more successful and more stable like it did for Stylus, then send us an email on info@officepower.net.
