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Case Study: Heritage Community Credit Union
Technology Growth Provides Optimum Service for Credit Union Members
Heritage Community Credit Union (HCCU) began working with Quest's cabling services group in August of 1997. Quest's responsibilities included laying CAT5 cable for both networking and voice applications.
"What was a challenge about the cabling work was that the ATMs needed a special configuration for their serial connections," said Quest's Ramon Hernandez, who managed the HCCU cabling work.
Hernandez added that the cabling in the remote offices was also a challenge because of the extremely tight time frame.
"From day one, Quest was there for Heritage 100 percent and always met our timelines," said Doug Fox, Heritage Community Credit Union's vice president of information technology systems. "So when we learned that the company had such in-depth capabilities, we decided to bring them in to help with our technology growth. We went from a federal charter credit union to a state charter credit union and that change gave us an opportunity to make some technology advancements. Quest was the right company to help us with those advancements."
Fox quickly learned about the wide range of services that Quest offered as a solutions provider outside of their cabling and construction services.
HCCU sought direction from Quest's network services group about 10 months ago when the official change of HCCU from federal to state happened. According to Fox, the company was searching for a way to understand the growth of their network as they expanded into new areas such as online banking. HCCU wanted a comprehensive analysis of their network, and Quest's extensive experience with financial institutions like Cal Fed and Golden1 positioned them to develop a network baseline for HCCU.
HCCU was having serious intermittent problems with their network prior to their work with Quest.
"We were having unexplained slowdowns and we weren't seeing the full capacity of our bandwidth," Fox said. "Quest came in and quickly offered a half dozen recommendations that we implemented and made a world of difference. They found that we had anomalies caused by a bridge protocol and their suggestions fixed the problems."
Mike Dillon, director of professional services for Quest, said that it was just a matter of reading the information properly and being able to interpret it.
"We came in to determine how things were running on their network infrastructure," Dillon said. "Heritage needed us to perform a complete assessment of the configuration of their network. We determined their needs by looking at what they were already using and looking at how they should structure their hub. We could then offer advice as to what direction to go in."
Quest acted as a third party to help solidify the Heritage network as one network instead of nine different branches. The goal was to get the network up and running and integrate the system's different branches throughout the Sacramento area.
"Our job is to take a series of messages being sent out by network management tools and give real world solutions to our customers on how to improve their network performance," Dillon said.
Optimum network performance is an absolute must in the financial world, according to Fox.
"In the financial business, real-time processing is essential to our business because it is absolutely necessary that our members are able to access their financial information in a variety of ways including Internet access, ATM machines or physically going into a branch," Fox said. "All of these systems depend on a smooth running network. It sends the message to our members that we've mastered technologies and can deliver information instantaneously."
Quest continues to work with HCCU in deploying network solutions.
"We had a really good experience with both the cabling services group and the professional services group of Quest, which is unusual with companies that have separate groups," Fox said. "Their customer drive is evident no matter who you are working with. They provide superior talent, are responsive to our business needs and make us feel like a special client. They are the Nordstrom of solution providers."
About Quest
Quest is a technology management company that has been serving Fortune 50-5000 and small and medium-sized corporations, state and local government, and educational institutions since 1982. The company offers clients a portfolio of professional services, managed services, telecommunications & transport, maintenance contract management, fiber-optics, wireless & structured cabling, and technical staffing, all backed by the most advanced technologies.
