Cornell Companies - Safety, Security, Service

Cornell Companies, Inc. (Cornell) is an industry leader in correctional and treatment services to local, state and federal agencies. Since 1973, Cornell has expanded to provide a wide range of corrections and therapeutic programs for adults and juveniles, including federal and state low to maximum security prisons, city jails, detention centers, residential re-entry centers, drug and alcohol treatment programs, and juvenile detention, treatment and alternative education centers. Cornell currently operates more than 70 facilities serving four federal agencies, 15 states and the District of Columbia as well as numerous cities and counties.

Challenge

Cornell's business constitutes a 365-day a year, 24-hours a day operation. The imperative was to have a strategy that would support the organization at all times, in a cost effective manner without placing undue stress on the lean IT department. Compounding this challenge was the difficulty of finding and maintaining the skill sets required to keep Cornell always current with their Lawson applications. As new releases are continued to be made available, new technologies introduced and new needs identified within the organization, Cornell IT resources found themselves frequently needing to support users after hours. Which was creating undue burdens on those resources.

Lawson Software delivers applications with significant depth and breadth of functionality. Because of this, it was a constant challenge to have the right knowledge, at the right time, available to meet changing requirements from their user community. The strategy had been to either invest in excessive training or contract with expensive ad hoc consulting resources, which from a cost and timing standpoint was difficult to budget and schedule.

Solution

Velocity provides Cornell with Remote Application Management, contracted at a fixed cost per month, along with access to consulting resources familiar with all of their applications. The services provided include a 7x24x365 service desk, technical support, functional support, patch management, database management, application tuning, system monitoring, backup and recovery, and support for custom interfaces.

Given Cornell's experiences with other service providers, it was critical that Velocity deliver these services with specific Service Level Agreements (SLA's) to insure the level of support provided to the user community was equal to, or better than, what they could receive from internal resources. With Velocity, Cornell was able to build a custom contract to suit their specific business needs.

Result

As a result of working with Velocity, Cornell has been able to shift all technical support requirements for Lawson applications out of IT and into the hands of Velocity. Cornell users are supported regardless of the time of day or day of week. Lawson applications are performing as expected and are always up-to-date with the most current releases, fixes and patches.

The Velocity Client Manager assigned to Cornell was extremely instrumental with the overall flow of on-going support. As noted by Cornell, "Normally someone who holds that title is more aligned with sales than with support. My experience had been that the only interaction was when you were re-negotiating a contract." That was not so with Velocity. "Our Client Manager has offered continual support throughout the entire process and provides the reliability of a trusted partner."

With the on-going maintenance supplied by Velocity, Cornell employees are never tied to work when they are away from work. Jennifer Taylor of Cornell Companies was asked at a recent Lawson user group why she wasn't on her phone throughout the entire conference. She responded, "Velocity is taking care of that for me right now!" Velocity has given her and her colleagues a peace of mind knowing their system is covered, even if their internal departments are not around.