Business article: The Bulletproof Network

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Filtrona Extrusion implemented a network redesign and network security solutions to guarantee uninterrupted business processes at sites across the United States and Mexico.

“Outsourcing seems like a sexy alternative for a lot of problems, but turning the management of your mission-critical infrastructure over to a third party is pretty scary,” says Jeff White, corporate director of IT for Filtrona Extrusion. When Jeff White joined Filtrona Extrusion as corporate IT director, the company was operating a single threaded network with mixed traffic mission-critical and non-mission critical traffic running side-by-side, with no way to separate or prioritize the two. In addition, the company experienced network performance problems and increasing amounts of downtime at its facility in Mexico. Because its manufacturing facilities run 24/7 and do not always have on-site technical resources available when there is a problem, the company needed a better solution.

“You just never know when things are going to happen, from a backhoe digging up a fiber cable or a more significant outage, and these situations were shutting down an entire facility,” says White. “Because the network is critical to all areas of our business, we needed to implement a fully redundant network to reconcile problems automatically and ensure we could remain up and running, no matter what the situation.”

Filtrona Extrusion is one of the largest manufacturers of extruded plastic profiles, sheets and specialty tubes in the United States. The company manufactures more than 40,000 different products for medical, merchandising, aviation, transportation, traffic, lighting, fencing and custom plastic industries. Its products range from catheter tubes, traffic posts and cones, plastic sheeting for fluorescent lights, air-conditioning ducts in commercial jets, and outdoor furniture.

All of Filtrona Extrusion’s business and manufacturing processes rely heavily on its managed network services. The company’s most critical business application is an enterprise resource-planning (ERP) system that runs on a centralized server in the corporate headquarters in Atlanta, with a standby server replicated in real time and located at a manufacturing facility in Tacoma, Wash. The ERP system manages sales, manufacturing, purchasing, shipping and receiving, accounting, and quality information for all locations, including additional manufacturing facilities in Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Monterrey, Mexico.


White uses a custom simple network-management protocol system to pull data off the routers directly in order to monitor the circuits and overall network performance.

Since plastic is a commodity product, Filtrona Extrusion must maintain complete visibility of its inventory at all times to ensure purchasing decisions can be made at the most advantageous price. Losing sight of inventory levels for as little as a few hours can prevent the company from taking advantage of spot-buy opportunities or force it to use a more-expensive, higher-grade of plastic than is required to fulfill an order for a customer. Moreover, if the ERP system is down, the company is unable to record quality data during the manufacturing process.
Without the quality data, there is no way to certify that the product meets the requirements specified by the customer, and without the certifications, the product cannot ship.

“Our whole planning system depends on inventory,” says White. “Without it, we don’t know what materials to buy or how much to purchase for existing orders, which creates some very significant business issues that can cost the company tens of millions of dollars.”

White’s first step after joining the company was to evaluate the effectiveness of his outsourced providers. He needed to understand what the current providers had done, and what they could do moving forward to help him meet the company’s strategic objectives.

About the author of The Bulletproof Network

Bill Dodds is vice president of sales and marketing for Virtela Communications. Virtela provides managed network services and security solutions to many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing multinational companies. Currently serving customers across six continents, Virtela’s network reach spans more than 190 countries. The company’s Global Service Fabric provides the foundation for delivering an extensive managed services suite, including enterprise WAN services, remote access services, remote monitoring and management services, and managed security services.