Carter Lumber

Carter Lumber migrates to Azure Cloud, scales up manufacturing systems by virtualization via Azure Virtual Desktop

Carter Lumber is one of the largest building materials suppliers in the United States. It is a family company represented by seven brands servicing professional builders and homeowners across thirteen states. Since 1932, the Carter Lumber family has provided exceptional service and quality building materials at competitive prices. Today, they offer an array of products related to Bath, Ceilings, Drywall, Decking and Railing, Exterior Doors, Engineered Wood Product (EWP), Flooring, Insulation, Interior Doors, Kitchens, Locksets, Lumber, Millwork and Stair Parts, Roofing, Siding and Trim, Windows, and Patio Doors.

The Carter Lumber team designs trusses, tracks internal workflow, send files to robotic machinery in shops, tracks shop performance, create production, and delivery schedules via the MiTek Suite. This software suite is synced with a separate accounting software for material inventory and pricing. As Carter Lumber grew and the business expanded, maintaining the manufacturing environment in a secure and scalable manner with its entire IT landscape and integrations became challenging and cumbersome.

Carter Lumber collaborated with Khoj Information Technology as a trusted partner to architect and build a scalable and performant environment for all manufacturing systems on Azure Cloud. The migration from various manufacturing locations to a single Azure cloud platform with accessibility via Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) not only reduced dependencies and cut costs, but delivered secure, consolidated, and seamless accessibility and resource management.

Updating and managing a large-scale IT infrastructure

Carter Lumber serves over 170 locations across the eastern half of the United States providing materials for commercial buildings and private homes. It is a large enterprise with multiple office, retail, and manufacturing locations. Being a one-stop shop for building needs demands consistent upskilling in terms of design, manufacturing, production, delivery, and installation. In today’s digital world, human processes depend heavily on systems and software to automate operations, maintain functions, and enforce quality in products as well as processes. Manufacturing IT Landscape includes setting up consolidated IT landscape across the board for multiple manufacturing locations.  This creates dependencies across the business and guaranteeing performance along with scalability and security grew to be a key concern.

The Carter Team operated 19 manufacturing locations, including 13 Truss and 6 EWP sites, where shop machines and workstations were not consolidated under a single domain, creating management challenges. Managing multiple manufacturing locations with workstations not part of a domain posed significant challenges for security, updates, and consistency. The decentralized nature of the machines increased the burden on IT and manufacturing teams for maintenance.

As a result, Carter Lumber faced performance bottlenecks, limited scalability, operational overheads, disaster recovery (DR) limitations, and management challenges caused by the following.

• Decentralized RDS Farms with periodic hardware upgrades: Multiple local servers were used for manufacturing, office, and shop workflows, with design software installed on individual designers’ PCs. Efforts were made to consolidate these into a data center server cluster and set up RDS (Remote Desktop Services) servers. However, the data center cluster was too small to support usage, leading to accessibility issues. Additionally, the RDS farm infrastructure was not easily scalable, requiring regular hardware maintenance, software updates, and troubleshooting. Any increase in demand required substantial hardware upgrades.
• DR and backup concerns for business continuity: Virtual Machine (VM) backups with no advanced DR solutions in place increased potential downtime risks in the case of failure. The lack of real-time replication and automated failover left the organization vulnerable to prolonged outages.
• Update management: To keep up with the changes in building codes, lumber structural values, and plating values, the version-specific design software undergoes frequent updates. For each update, that specific version of the software must be installed and maintained on each designer’s personal computer. It also implied that the local installations be synced with the office server to maintain the current inventory selections, pricing, and model changes. Such an update required the IT team to upgrade 14 office servers, 15 shop servers, and perform hundreds of local installations. Moreover, the upgrade must be completed overnight to ensure compatibility between all the systems.It would take the IT team to dedicatedly work with each user to solve system issues for at least two weeks.
• Security and Performance: Manufacturing software was being used by designers locally on their workstations, with design files transferred to a central file share for further management.

“The Khoj team was instrumental in developing and deploying our Azure environment. I feel our system is setup in a way to allow Carter to seamlessly continue to grow the environment as needed. Khoj’s experience, organization and expertise with Azure was greatly appreciated throughout the process.”

Chad Lyon

Manufacturing Support Manager

Embarking on a cloud journey

In the face of these challenges, Carter Lumber considered the following options:

1. Create a fully optimized and business ready cloud environment. Implement AVD and migrate on-premises file servers to Azure and on-premises SQL servers to Azure SQL PaaS.
2. Continue to maintain the current system. Add hardware to accommodate the growing number of users. Hire more IT staff to help maintain all the local installs. Continue to purchase expensive high-end computers to support the design software.
3. Use their manufacturing software’s cloud hosted option for the office application servers and the designers’ computers. However, it does not address the need for shop production servers or the third-party software required to run the business.

A cloud-first strategy then became a natural choice for them to ensure seamless operations across locations, provides scalability across multiple manufacturing locations, secure and efficient access to applications and data, and helps manage IT costs effectively. A consolidated and collaborative cloud environment accelerates growth with quick deployments and advanced security that prevents data loss and keeps the IT infrastructure highly flexible.

Khoj with their proven expertise in application modernization including architecture services, cloud adoption framework and strategy, CloudScape4ENT Suite of methodologies, and digital transformation became the partner of choice for Carter Lumber.

Khoj offered to quickly deploy Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform as a scalable, secure, and business-proven solution. As the first step in migrating on-premises solutions to the cloud, the Khoj team initially migrated the first few locations to the Azure environment. The leadership and stakeholders at Carter Lumber quickly recognized the benefits and potential outcomes of the proposed solution. Although the initial transition to AVD encountered some performance challenges, specifically with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) workloads. These issues were quickly addressed through the following solutions:

• GPU updates and driver Installation. Updating drivers and configuring the environment for high-performance computing helped optimize the GPU performance for the Manufacturing Suite.
• Monitoring and performance tuning. By leveraging Azure Monitor and other performance tracking tools, the IT team was able to continuously monitor the environment and apply adjustments proactively.

Within two years, the team successfully migrated all locations into Azure.

Executing a hassle-free migration

A streamlined migration to the cloud required a well-architected and carefully planned process. From assessment to migration, testing, and optimization. Collaborative effort between Carter Team and Khoj teams made it an efficient and successful migration ensuring minimal disruption to existing operations.

The solution required five workspaces with eight tiers of host pools. The Khoj team also set up a development environment to test updates and patches before applying them to the masses. Designers were given access to hardware that allowed them to perform their jobs via remote applications. Depending on job functions, applications, such as MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, and other supporting programs were loaded on the Remote Desktop session hosts to enable sharing between users. The migration team paid close attention to the resources being used and scaled out the hardware for SQL servers and sessions hosts. VMs were configured to match the specific requirements of Carter Lumber’s manufacturing processes.

AVD was implemented for the customer using Nerdio Manager Enterprise. With the help of the tool, deployment, configuration, and maintenance became hassle-free allowing the team to leverage various automation features.

Azure Monitoring and Log Analytics were used for visualizations, dashboarding and reporting of the environment The reports are visualized in clear dashboards and provide sound data for important decisions to ensure the best possible, cost-effective performance of the IT infrastructure.

Transforming into an efficient business

Carter Lumber’s move from the traditional IT infrastructure to a robust ecosystem based on Microsoft Cloud enabled the company to gain flexibility and agility. This cloud transformation saved time and contributed to business performance.

• Onboarding new users is quicker and the process is now performed via Azure AD group access to set up permissions to required applications (database, file share, AVD, etc.) as opposed to installing applications and configuring setups in local systems.
• Design renderings and file transfers became much faster with access to GPU-powered VMs. The Carter Lumber organization manages 650 profiles in the system and updates now take hours rather than days. The cloud architecture also allows external sales teams to access the system so that they have up-to-date information while on-field. Carter Lumber no longer invests on CAD enabled personal machines.
• The built-in security associated with AVD access enables users to connect from anywhere through their environment without facing VPN issues. The integration with Azure Active Directory provides advanced security features, improving overall compliance.

• Carter Lumber can scale their virtual desktop environment up or down based on the demand, ensuring that the resources are used only when necessary.
• Centralized management of workstations and applications through Azure reduced the operational burden on the IT team. Patching, updates, and security policies are applied seamlessly across all locations. Service desk tickets are reduced as the application is controlled centrally and more efficiently.
• Azure Site Recovery ensured that Carter Lumber’s manufacturing operations can continue without disruption in the event of a disaster, thanks to the real-time failover and backup capabilities.

By transitioning to Azure Virtual Desktop, Carter Lumber was able to overcome the limitations of their legacy infrastructure. The migration delivered enhanced performance, scalability, security, and disaster recovery, while reducing overall IT overhead. Azure Virtual Desktop provided the company with the flexibility and power they needed to run their resource-intensive manufacturing applications efficiently, allowing them to focus on growth and innovation.

Azure Cloud has made adapting to technology changes a breeze at Carter Lumber. Most importantly, Carter’s IT team are able to  focus on strategic business initiatives and are less burdened with day-day operational issues. Carter team looks forward to more cloud-driven innovation in the future.

“Khoj not only helped us standup the environment for our manufacturing systems but laid the foundation so we could leverage Azure platform in the future as we look to building automations and scalability into our business processes”

Leadership team

Carter Lumber