Private equity (PE) firms typically expect their newly acquired portfolio companies to deliver increased gross margin and revenue within specific timeframes. There are varying strategies to help achieve these goals and many firms rely on technology transformation and innovation to succeed. To help advise their portfolio companies, middle-market PE firms often need guidance and support from technology experts who can recommend, execute, and support technology solutions that help accelerate progress towards defined goals. 
 

Customer Challenge

A PE firm had recently acquired a snack food manufacturing company based in Northern Indiana and modernizing the company’s IT infrastructure and strengthening its security posture were the highest priority initiatives. The company’s IT team was lean and had partnered with a small, local Managed Services Provider (MSP) to manage its on-premises infrastructure. Although the company had an internal IT department and an MSP, they still lacked the experience and breadth of skills needed to progress in their digital transformation. Moreover, they did not possess the expertise needed to execute and support a modern cloud-centric IT platform. 

Their main challenge was finding a partner who could not only design and implement the overall IT strategy and roadmap but could also provide a full range of advanced managed services capabilities to support and continuously innovate their evolving technology stack and end user needs.
 

Managed Services Solution

The company engaged BDO Digital as their Managed Services Provider to deliver a full suite of complementary services, from cloud infrastructure monitoring and management, to ongoing advisory services. At the beginning of the partnership, and through the initial managed services onboarding process, the BDO Digital team assessed the environment and identified multiple single points of failure, unsupported applications, and several risk and compliance gaps.  

BDO Digital developed a prioritized plan for stabilizing and modernizing the company’s environment. The start of the technology roadmap included initiatives that closed gaps and helped set the foundation for further transformation and alignment to business objectives.

These initiatives included:

• Productivity
  • Microsoft 365 – OneDrive, SharePoint, Email, Teams
• Cost Reduction
  • Windows servers to Azure
  • Toolset and on-premises infrastructure consolidation
• Risk Reduction
  • Disaster recovery refresh
  • Security assessment
  • Enterprise networking modernization
• Revenue Generation
  • ERP selection and roadmap – Support new service line and company growth
  • Data analytics and reporting envisioning – deliver standardized KPI reporting and advanced analytics to provide dynamic pricing capabilities

Results and Benefits

The company is now realizing the benefits of their technology investments as they continue to execute against their roadmap, which is being led and managed by BDO Digital’s Managed Services team. As various solutions are implemented, additional managed services are layered on to provide long term support and continuous improvement of the solution. These steps are helping deliver strong ROI and value to the business.

BDO Digital’s comprehensive managed services capabilities have been incorporated into the various solution lifecycles in the following ways:

• Managed Defense – as the company strengthened its security defenses with Microsoft solutions, Managed Defense was implemented to provide 24x7 real-time security event monitoring, detection and response services to protect the company’s endpoints, email and identities.
• Cloud Advisory – As the customer moved to Azure, BDO provided consumption reporting and analysis to control and optimize cloud spend. BDO also provided expert guidance regarding new cloud capabilities that would were tied to business use cases and delivered the advanced monitoring, alerting, and support services needed to provide a stable and optimal infrastructure.
• Virtual DBA – This service delivers proactive SQL management focused on optimizing the performance and stability for a key line of business application that was migrated to Azure.
   

Next Steps 

Following the advice of BDO Digital, the company has created opportunities for IT and the business to collaborate on planning and strategy. The company can now offload critical and foundational IT functions such as Service Desk to BDO Digital. As the technology foundation was strengthened through the efforts described above, the company and BDO Digital are now focusing on additional transformation efforts that center around revenue growth and market expansion.