Success Story: Wilbur Ellis
vCom helped this family-owned holding company centralize and standardize their IT environment, leading to lower costs, improved connections, reduced downtime, and improved support to their customers.
Founded in 1921, Wilbur Ellis is a $3 billion holding company with more than 250 locations. With successful divisions in agribusiness, specialty chemicals, and animal nutrition, Wilbur Ellis has expanded by providing the essentials for the world to thrive.
Challenges
As Wilbur Ellis has expanded, its ability to operate as a single, unified entity has suffered. Many of their locations came through acquisition and continued to operate their IT autonomously with no way for the central organization to see where, what, and how much they were spending.
- IT silos at 250 locations
- No centralized visibility into services or spend
- Non-payment shut offs and late fees were common
Company
Wilbur Ellis
Industry
Agriculture
Locations
250
Decrease in MB Cost
64%
Annual Savings
$367,981
Working with vCom
Jameson Wick, Wilbur Ellis’ Senior Manager for Enterprise Support, and his team of six took on the challenge of consolidating IT and telecom spending across branches and implementing better governance for the company’s IT assets.
To achieve their goal of transforming IT into a value source rather than a reactive firefighting environment, Wick’s team began by standardizing and centralizing smaller locations. They leveraged vCom’s vManager platform for insights and decision-making, using it as a central repository for information.
Recognizing their team’s limitations, Wick partnered with vCom, allowing his internal team to focus on strategic execution while vCom handled tactical issues. This collaboration led to the standardization and centralization of IT/telecom, resulting in improved governance, cost reduction (sometimes up to 90%), and increased bandwidth without significant cost escalation at Wilbur Ellis.
We look at [vCom] as an extension of our group, giving us advice, recommendations, and constant communication and feedback.
