New-plant relocation: multi-vendor coordination and base IT infrastructure (extended to a second site)
As the only IT contact, in my first month I took over planning, procurement, acceptance and relocation of the new plant's network, server room, IP phone system, attendance and access control, and meeting-room AV. The server room and network were cut over on moving day, and extra network drops were added and faults fixed afterwards. This does not claim zero downtime throughout.
① Vendor coordination and procurement governance
- Coordinated 6+ types of external vendors: telecom carriers, system integrators, network-equipment resellers, UPS/power and low-voltage contractors.
- Drew up "standard" and "lean" budget options; handled comparison, negotiation, payment terms and vendor registration.
- Followed internal procurement controls for requisition, sign-off, ordering and on-site acceptance, with all paperwork retained for audit.
② Server room and plant-wide network
- Core server room: planned rack cabling, UPS and power improvements, and consolidated old equipment into a dedicated room.
- Network backbone: managed switches, multi-floor wired drops, seamless plant-wide Wi-Fi, multi-WAN load balancing and cross-site VPN.
- Peripherals: integrated the IP phone system, cross-site time clocks, large meeting-room projection and AV, and network printers.
③ Incident response and hands-on troubleshooting
- Cut fibre during roadworks: when the old plant's telecom fibre was dug up and phones went down, a 4G backup route was activated the same day while repairs were arranged.
- Network loop storm: traced an intermittent LAN outage to a physical loop and added protection on managed switches.
- Recovering old assets: located servers and disks left at the old plant, inventoried historical finance data and rebuilt usable parts into standby nodes.