Forever Cheese Overhauls Its Technology Environment with Resultant

Forever Cheese was founded in 1998 with a focus on importing the highest quality cheese and accompaniments from the Mediterranean. Over 25 years, the business grew larger than its founders had expected, and its IT environment lagged. After a leadership transition in 2021, the business brought in Resultant as the IT managed services partner who’d help them achieve the IT modernization it needed to catch up to its growth.  

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The Problem

Forever Cheese needed to modernize its IT environment without in-house IT personnel and some significant challenges:

  • The business was running on a server that already had outlasted its intended life span.
  • Outdated applications and network infrastructure needed to be replaced.
  • A Google Workspace integration had not been properly strategized and so had left data access entirely too open.
  • IT policies needed to be established or updated.
  • Although sales representatives traveled frequently, the company was not equipped to facilitate remote work.
  • Warehouse reporting relied on a lot of manual processes.

Its current state of affairs impeded Forever Cheese’s growth plans and exposed it to unplanned business disruption.

Clear, steady communication and careful change management from the start made the process happen not just quickly but smoothly.

"The changes Resultant implemented have led to increased productivity and collaboration in different work environments and more fluid communication. They have helped build culture and community," said Eric Vorchheimer, CFO at Forever Cheese.

About the Client

Since 1998, Forever Cheese has existed to share the finest artisanal Mediterranean products, focusing on cheeses and specialty foods from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Croatia.

Outcomes
  • Replaced Forever Cheese’s equipment, from network equipment and monitors down to mice and keyboards.
  • Prepared three weeks of training to ease employees through the cloud migration; stayed on site to ease the transition and answer questions.
  • Integrated Intune for computer management, which enables our team to securely manage equipment remotely.
  • Overcame the “anywhere and everywhere” data storage approach with SharePoint.
  • Established a technology environment that provides a baseline the company can build from—and made it happen in six months instead of the 18 months our roadmap had planned for.

Our Approach

The client needed big improvements fast—with minimal disruption—and it needed them to scale through planned expansion. And, to really keep things interesting, Forever Cheese was about to start an ERP migration and move to a new office space.

Our team conducted a technology assessment and met with the CFO and other department heads several times a week during the first month of our engagement to develop a technology roadmap that would align with their business goals.

Change management is always a big part of any engagement and especially here, where longstanding employees and a major technology upgrade were part of the equation, it became doubly important.

The Solution

Forever Cheese now maintains a modern, flexible, and secure technology environment that enables better reporting and supports remote work. We helped them move to a serverless environment using Intune, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365, with security solutions from Barracuda and Trend Micro.

“Our cybersecurity upgrades have been massive,” said Eric Vorchheimer, CFO for Forever Cheese. “We are now best in class, which has provided lot of comfort. Our upgrades enabled us to support an acquisition and growth from 37 employees to 55—and every employee can hit the ground running with our new-hire processes in place.”

Our team

  • Replaced Forever Cheese’s equipment, from network equipment and monitors down to mice and keyboards. Not one piece of physical hardware—not even the cables—went untouched.
  • Prepared three weeks of training to ease employees through the cloud migration; stayed on site to ease the transition and answer questions.
  • Integrated Intune for computer management, which enables our team to securely manage equipment remotely.
  • Spent 10 days in New York helping the company move and set up its new office.
  • Overcame the “anywhere and everywhere” data storage approach with SharePoint.
  • Established a technology environment that provides a baseline the company can build from—and made it happen in six months instead of the 18 months our roadmap had planned for.
  • Clear, steady communication and careful change management from the start made the process happen not just quickly but smoothly.

The Outcome

With a secure, strong technology environment in place, Forever Cheese employees can access what they need remotely—and without creating a security threat—and the company has what it needs to really grow its data maturity. A PowerBI project was recently completed, and a warehouse management system that will eradicate time-consuming manual processes is upcoming.

Forever Cheese is functioning securely and smoothly from its new offices—and from several countries at once—with the unexpected benefit of building the company culture.

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