Egnyte Customer Case Study - Cherokee Fire Protection

Background

Cherokee Fire Protection is a construction and service company, which specializes in the installation, inspection and maintenance of commercial fire sprinkler systems. The Cherokee staff maintains knowledge of fire codes, standards changes and trends, as well as product development, so that clients receive the best solutions to meet their specific life safety and fire protection needs.

Headquartered in Xenia, OH, the Cherokee Fire Protection team has been servicing clients throughout Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Indiana since 2005. Cherokee installs and services all major brands of equipment, including Tyco, Viking, Reliable and Globe and is an active member of both the National Fire Sprinkler Association (NFSA) and the American Backflow Prevention Association (ABPA).

Challenge

Previous to finding the Egnyte solution, Cherokee relied on a 95% paper-based document management system. The majority of its corporate documents, including customer contracts, fire inspection analysis and code audits sat in file cabinets in its physical office.

In addition, compliance factors have made it essential for Cherokee to save important inspection documents for a minimum of three years. With mounds of paper piling up in the office, it was critical that Cherokee install a good electronic document management system to ensure security, ease of use among staff and ready availability of necessary documents, should clients, fire marshals or insurance companies call.

The Solution

While Cherokee's President Forest Wilson felt he already had a good process in place for storage and retention and paper, he read an article about cloud storage in the Wall Street Journal and became intrigued.

At the same time, the company was working to be ISO certified with regards to quality management systems. Wilson knew he couldn't be compliant if there wasn't backup of his physical documents. If a natural disaster were to occur, this would be catastrophic to his business.

Wilson began an Internet search for "cloud servers" by using Google. He found Egnyte and spent some time on the site investigating the service. Wilson immediately signed up for Egnyte's free trial; he felt it would be helpful to test-drive the service before getting locked into a contract.

After a short time with the service, Wilson quickly realized the value of Egnyte and decided to completely move away from his physical file cabinet storage system. He officially signed up, set up his staff, and occasionally uses the Egnyte app to access documents from his Android mobile phone. He likes this user feature, as it is useful when he is in the field at a client site.

Most of all, however, Wilson loves the widespread data access among staff and clients alike. Now, with Egnyte he and his staff can set up a client exchange folder that allows their clients or insurance or government personnel to read or download critical inspection documents for easy collaboration. "We have become so much more efficient with Egnyte," said Wilson.

Key Benefits

• Cost effective data access, collaboration and backup capabilities; great value for any small business
• Continually reliable service; never any downtime
• File access and sharing from smartphone with Egnyte's mobile app

Testimonial

When asked to sum up the benefits and experience with Egnyte, Forest Wilson offers:

"Egnyte provides a service that helps businesses like me maintain compliance with records retention policies. I was skeptical about cloud computing at first, but this service continually holds its value."