Waddington North America

Waddington, North America is a leading manufacturer of disposable drinkware, dinnerware, servingware, cutlery and custom packaging with a broad line of upscale products. It employs over 1,000 employess across 5 manufacturing facilities in the US and Canada. The company is headquartered in Covington, KY

The was originally a games manufacturer based in the UK. It expanded into the packaging business in the US. In the later 1990's Waddington PLC in the UK was sold to Hasbro and the US interests were sold to a private equity group called CHS. Under CHS the company acquired a number of niche manufacturers of disposable foodservice items and grew to become the leading manufacturer of these items in its market.

In 2007, CHS sold their interests in the company to two new private equity groups.

The first step once the IFS had been rolled out to the companies that at that time were owned by the company was completed was to build a network around a single domain with a Windows Active Directory. From this springboard it provided the opportunity to replace personal email addresses that employees used to communicate with other companies with a single domain using Windows Exchange Server.

IT purchases in 2004/5 were still devolved down to individual managers in some cases. Consequently IT was overwhelmed by trying to support multiple PC and printer models and software versions and there was no control over what the users downloaded on their machines incluidng pirated software and Anti-virus protection was patchy. Consequently the next big effort was towards standardizing on PC Hardware and Software and removing administrator rights from the users. Where possible networked versions of applications were installed such as Symantec Endpoint Protection and all user PC's and Laptop were installed from disk mirrors to ensure consistency and version control of what applications were installed. This effort was supplemented with a focus on documented policy process and procedure. Although many managers were hostile to this approach ( and some still are today) maintenance and support requests tailed off significantly over the two year period after this initiative was introduced.

One consequence of moving away from company-specific legacy systems to Enterprise applications and hardware administered from the Data Center was that WNA was more vulnerable to network outages and application errors. Previously, legacy systems allowed companies to work independently of others. Now an outage would impact all sites. Effort was thus directed towards Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery initiatives and solutions. At one extreme some of the solutions were mundane such as proper back-up and maintenance routines, server spares, UPS's and Back-up generators. At the other extreme the solutions were highly complex and required significant investment such as real-time replicated applications and hardware across the network.

The changing relationship between the company and its vendors and customers over the past five years and driven the techologies that IT has implemented and not just in the area of EDI. Greater integration and collaboration has reshaped business relationships and this has been reflected by increasing number of integration projects we have undertaken. A number of these integration projects relate to internally hosted applications like Mattec and Intek. Others require integration with SAAS over the internet such as Syncada, Transite Mimecast and Adaptive Planning. Indeed further integrations, collaborations and maships will continue to drive IT for many years to come.

More detail on the summary above and selected projects and milestones can be viewed below. They have been categorized under applications, hardware, network and communications, the development of the IT Department itself including its shifting focus and finally the projects and initiatives themselves have been sorted in chronological order.

	Date
Snagit	2013
DLO	2009
HP Blades	2007