A couple of months ago I had an appointment at Brickman (a national commercial landscape architectural firm) at 8:00am … I walk into their office and immediately the network team tells me that they can’t meet because their building was hit by lighting and they are working to bring their network back up.
I dropped off the breakfast I had brought them and proceeded to drive from Brickman’s Langhorne, PA regional office back to our Wayne, PA Alliant office.
At about 9am, and halfway to the Wayne PA office, I get a call from Brickman… a rack of Cisco gear was fried in the lighting strike and they need immediate replacements. Not the next day. TODAY. And they will do whatever it takes to get it done……..
It’s now 9:15am and I got their list of gear specs, called our Sales Ops team to get info on product availability at the local Ingram Micro distribution centers (South Jersey and Jonestown PA). Sales Ops does the calls, finds out where the gear is in-stock (Jonestown PA center), and then we patch in our CFO to approve the PO for Ingram Micro. I get the PO emailed to me, the sales order is faxed over to Brickman, and they send it back signed on the spot.
Since there was no delivery service that could do same-day, and it’s now after 10am, I said to Brickman, “I’ll get directions from MapQuest on the PDA and hit the open road to Jonestown PA,” (101 miles away) in my Durango.
I reached Ingram Micro. My PO is there. My gear is there. And Ingram loads my truck up with a rack of Cisco equipment…. 2:00pm I hit the road back to Langhorne Pa.
By 5:00pm I am on-site at Brickman unloading my Durango full of Cisco gear for the Brickman guys to start racking. By 7:00pm that evening they are back on-line and processing their branch data and OVERJOYED that I was able to deliver the goods to them with using my internal resources to help them out in a time of dire need.
202 miles round trip, 8 hours on the road and a very pleased customer later, I made my way home through rush hour traffic… Got calls from the staff there thanking me for taking the initiative to think outside the box and make it happen.
Alliant Account Manager
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