Chinook Lumber

About Chinook Lumber

Known for supplying premium lumber and quality building materials to its customers, Chinook Lumber is a well-established and highly respected lumberyard based near Seattle, WA. Founded in 1988, the business specialises in lumber, decking, fencing, roofing materials and more, serving both professional contractors and homeowners. Over the years, Chinook Lumber has established long-standing relationships with local suppliers to ensure the highest quality building materials are provided. Chinook Lumber are proud to work with the very best – including Trex, Azek, TimberTech and Milwaukee.

The challenge

In 2022, Chinook Lumber began working with Klipboard (formerly Excenta) to support the hosting of its ERP, financial systems and Microsoft 365 environment. While the company had relied on its existing ERP system for many years, it was increasingly experiencing performance and reliability issues.

Klipboard designed and implemented a brand-new, dedicated Microsoft Azure environment tailored specifically to Chinook Lumber’s needs. This enabled the business to:

The solution

Klipboard designed and implemented a brand-new, dedicated Microsoft Azure environment tailored specifically to Chinook Lumber’s needs. This enabled the business to:

• Run its ERP and associated applications efficiently.
• Integrate seamlessly with third-party services, including eCommerce and warehouse management system (WMS) providers.
• Benefit from Azure’s cloud-native security architecture, including network segmentation to help limit ransomware spread and lateral movement.

The solution provided a comprehensive functional environment for all Chinook Lumber users to work in, with access to key applications such as its ERP system, Microsoft Outlook, Teams and OneDrive alongside other essential business tools like finance, quoting and more.

Klipboard manages the availability and security of the environment, installing updates out of hours as well as processing requests and incidents on Chinook Lumber’s behalf, effectively acting as an extension of its IT team.

Chinook Lumber's Microsoft 365 licensing is also supplied and managed by Klipboard, covering their e-mail, OneDrive, and Teams – strengthening security whilst helping to boost productivity. The Microsoft 365 licensing was previously handled in-house, however Klipboard applied its security benchmark to the Microsoft tenant, helping Chinook Lumber to downgrade to a cheaper, more productive set of licenses too.

What I’m most proud of is our long-standing journey with Chinook Lumber, supporting the team through such a vast scale of change, while navigating challenges affecting the wider business. The secure Azure environment helped to consolidate its existing ERP, enabling associated applications to run more seamlessly, while strengthening security with Azure’s cloud-native security architecture. We are proud to have provided an all-round solution to Chinook Lumber, while being on hand to offer ongoing support.

Liam Freeman, Klipboard's Infrastructure Director

The result

The migration to Azure was completed over a 12-week period, with all users testing in the new Azure environment before go-live.
The Klipboard team worked flexibly to support the West Coast time zone, ensuring disruption was minimized and any migration work took place out of hours.

Following the migration to Azure, Chinook Lumber saw improved system performance and faster service management response times. 

Over the past three years of working together since the migration, the business has been able to focus on other areas of the business, such as developing its eCommerce solution, while staying safe and performant in its ERP environment. The Klipboard team has taken care of its ERP upgrade requirements when needed, guiding the team through a testing environment for approval before upgrading the live system out-of-hours.

Chinook Lumber has also been able to introduce additional third-party products to its environment, working closely with Klipboard to ensure each implementation was smooth, secure and aligned with business needs.

Excenta is simply the best.  In the three plus years since going live in Excenta’s Azure environment, we have not had a single minute of downtime.  Not one.  In addition, with Excenta’s unique performance tools, our ERP has never run faster.  User complaints have simply vanished.  Most importantly, are of course the people.  The Excenta team is anyone’s dream team.  They’re experts.  They care, and they are proactive.  This cannot be overstated.  They truly are simply the best.

Chinook Lumber

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