SYDNEY, Australia, Thursday, December 14th, 2006 -

Despite a devastating fire that destroyed a Lidcombe warehouse and caused $2million in damages last month, automotive parts supplier Filter Sales Australia swiftly re-established operations due to the assistance of IT provider, Markinson Business Solutions.

Massive fire damage to property, data and business systems at the Filter Sales Australia (FSA) warehouse required the business to relocate to another warehouse and revert to manual trade for a number of days, costing an estimated $5million in trade and systems’ downtime and lack of employee productivity. 

However the cost of devastation was vastly minimised by the rapid recovery and installation of the company’s mission-critical computer system, MomentumPro™ Enterprise which was a major factor in restoring FSA’s normal operations.

	Part of the devastation at Filter Sales Australia's Lidcombe Warehouse

"The fire devastated our property, business data and computer systems, so it was hard to tell where to start picking up the pieces. Markinson were fantastic in going out of their way to prioritise our project and help to get us back on our feet," General Manager of Filter Sales Australia, Juan Arancibia said.

Based in Brisbane, Markinson’s technical services team successfully implemented a disaster recovery strategy that involved the prioritisation of FSA’s crisis project, the recovery of business-critical data and the coordination and build of new hardware and software in Sydney that would help restore FSA’s normal operations.

Markinson prioritised the immediate cut of new MomentumPro software, the latest patch releases and hardware according to FSA’s specifications and coordinated the assembly of a new server off-site with FSA’s external IT adviser, Steve Bennet in Sydney.

"Markinson provided the services to rebuild the MomentumPro installation, including Progress and the latest MomentumPro patch. The database backup tapes were a crucial part to the restoration, and without the diligent backup procedures at Filter Sales, the recovery would not have been possible", Markinson’s Technical Services Manager, Andrew Munro said.

Crucial data back-up tapes, in addition to critical information on customers, suppliers and sales histories were then recovered and installed on the new hardware.

"Filter Sales were quick to provide a server and access to the machine. As everything was lost, we were able to recut the media and proceed with the system rebuild while Filter Sales concentrated on a new building and general business recovery," said Munro.

"With Markinson’s assistance, we have been able to successfully re-established regular operations before systems and trade down-time crippled us financially and damaged our reputation with customers and suppliers; the re-instalment our business information and to have MomentumPro Enterprise running again has been critical to FSA’s recovery process," said Arancibia.

Filter Sales Australia has been using MomentumPro Enterprise software to manage their distribution and warehousing operations for almost 10 years.