Since its start in 1958, ADCO Manufacturing in Sanger, California has grown into one of the foremost manufacturers and installers of packaging machinery and systems. The machinery ADCO designs, and builds is complex, sometimes massive, and are marvels of engineering excellence.

Keeping the approximately 20 CAD engineers, 70 office workers, and the hundred-plus plant workers connected is a challenging duty for ADCO’s Information Technology Manager. And keeping the system running smoothly, and their IT manager sane has been the responsibility of McMillan IT Engineering for over 30 years.

Over time McMillan has steadily improved ADCO’s network with a coherent plan of upgrading existing infrastructure to meet future technology demands, allowing for seamless integration of new ideas, such as utilizing tablets on the shop floor to bring up machinery designs instead of relying on paper renderings.

Being a trusted, reliable support and maintenance resource is the mission of a software tool McMillan uses that creates peace of mind for ADCO’s internal IT. Every sixty seconds, multiple critical components of the entire system are analyzed and if statistics deviate from acceptable norms, alerts are immediately sent and addressed.

It’s all part of McMillan’s belief in customizing and leveraging applications and automation to give its clients a competitive edge. It starts with doing everything right from the start and building a relationship of trust. And even better if that means helping IT managers get a good night’s sleep.

When startups get rolling their technology challenges multiply dramatically. For Cellares thataxiom became abundantly clear within a few short years of its founding. A life sciences technology company based in South San Francisco, Cellares is working to make cell therapy widely available and affordable with the Cell Shuttle, a self-contained ‘factory-in-a-box’ for industrial-scale cell therapy manufacturing that improves the immune system’s ability to defeat cancer.

With an employee roster shooting past 150, Cellares asked McMillan IT Engineering to review the existing Cellares network in late 2021. What they found was a state-of-the-art company with a low-tech wired network built using SOHO (small-office, home-office) grade equipment with no in-place redundancies. Overall, the computing platform lacked performance, scalability, and resiliency.

What McMillan proposed was a complete replacement of the networking systems with enterprise-class, next-generation technology, carried out in multiple phases to minimize the impact on business operations.

The result produced expanded bandwidth, higher network speeds, more robust protection from ransomware or human error, continuous monitoring and troubleshooting of critical network systems, and bulletproof backup and recovery capabilities.

Cellares is a rapidly growing company working hard to bring life-saving technology to the world. And now McMillan has made sure they have the technology to handle anything the future brings.