Lightyear Customer Case Study: Westfall Technik

Westfall Technik achieved a 10x+ ROI leveraging Lightyear for network inventory management, bill consolidation, and procurement.

Meet Westfall Technik

Westfall Technik is an international network of companies and experts that provide end-to-end molded plastic part manufacturing solutions. Westfall’s manufacturing solutions cover the full lifecycle of molded plastic parts, including design, prototyping, tooling, automation, molding, assembly and logistics, and Westfall’s products are sold globally, across verticals, with particular emphasis on Healthcare and Consumer Packaged Goods. Westfall maintains a global manufacturing operation with 2,000+ employees, 25+ locations, 300+ automated machines, and over 1 million square feet of manufacturing space.

Distributed Operation Creates Telecom Challenges

In managing such a large footprint, Jon Kerr, Westfall’s Sr. Director of IT and Dan Nelson, Westfall’s IT Security and Operations Manager, had their work cut out for them. 

A manufacturing operation with lots of space and automated machinery requires a high-performance network that’s up and available at all times. A distributed, global footprint also means that getting this network stood up requires RFPs across many ISPs with checkpoints for serviceability, redundancy, and more, and that post-install issue resolution / bill payment would require a high degree of organization to get things sorted promptly. Unfortunately, as we’re well aware, ISPs do not make any of this easy.

When it came to procurement of new services, Jon noted that things were not easy prior to Lightyear. “ISP procurement felt like dealing with a local monopoly at every site we’d aim to buy services for prior to Lightyear.” Without data-driven help and automation, finding the right ISP, validating serviceability and diversity, and getting things installed was always a battle.

After services did get installed, bill payments were Westfall’s biggest pain point, prompting the search for a vendor to help.

Finally, keeping track of contracts and renewals was a further pain for Westfall’s busy and stretched team. When it came to circuit contract end-of-life, “nobody was paying attention,” prior to Lightyear, meaning services would end up auto-renewing without proper action, and it was not always clear which site had which services on what term.

Lightyear’s System of Record Helps Create Organization

It was the payment issue that had Dan Nelson from Westfall on the search for telecom help, but Lightyear was thankfully able to help Westfall sort out nearly all of their telecom pains. Westfall ended up utilizing Lightyear’s Procurement software, Network Inventory Manager, and Bill Consolidation service.

With Lightyear’s Network Inventory Manager, Westfall leveraged Lightyear to organize fulsome data for each service in their network, audit their spend in depth, and ensure they’d never miss a renewal deadline again. Lightyear identified several opportunities for potential savings or optimization in conjunction with inventory onboarding as well.

Lightyear’s Bill Consolidation service, where Lightyear pays vendors on Westfall’s behalf and offers Westfall one monthly simple bill, has stopped the constant outages that previously plagued Westfall. Now, Westfall pays Lightyear monthly and trusts Lightyear to audit monthly invoices on Westfall’s behalf, and Lightyear handles the rest. Lightyear even identified one vendor for voice services who was consistently overbilling Westfall, withheld payment, and helped prompt a cost-saving vendor change. “We’ve had no outages in the timeframe we’ve been together, which has been tremendous for us.”

Finally, Westfall’s procurement of new telecom services has been made easy with Lightyear’s automation and data. No longer does it feel like they have no options at each location they procure for. “We trust Lightyear to conduct an exhaustive search on every site we work on together.”