IT support for El Paso wholesale and distribution businesses
TechBit Solutions supports El Paso wholesale and distribution businesses where it matters: warehouse wireless that works with the racking full, ERP infrastructure watched constantly, and support in Spanish on both sides of the border.
What distributors call us about
TechBit Solutions supports wholesale and distribution businesses across the El Paso region, an area whose economy is built on moving goods.
The calls are specific and they are urgent. Scanners that stop reading in one part of the building. An ERP that has slowed to the point that order entry is backing up. A label printer that has stopped. A customer portal nobody can reach.
What we support
- Warehouse wireless, designed and measured for a building with stock in it
- Handheld scanners, mobile computers and the systems they talk to
- ERP and warehouse management infrastructure
- Label and document printers across receiving, picking and shipping
- Office systems: email, accounting, purchasing and customer service
- EDI connections and customer portals
- Security across the whole operation, including the parts that never leave the warehouse floor
- Cross-border connectivity where an operation runs on both sides
Warehouse scanning and wireless coverage
Warehouse wireless is the single most common thing we get called about in this sector, and it is almost always a design problem rather than a hardware problem.
A network laid out in an empty building behaves completely differently once racking is installed and the racking is full. Metal shelving, palletised stock, freezers and roller doors all move the coverage. Add a neighbouring business on the same channels and you get the pattern everyone recognizes: it works in the morning and fails by afternoon.
We measure before we install anything. See wireless networks.
The ERP is the business
In a distribution business the ERP is not an application, it is the whole operation. When it is slow, receiving backs up, picking slows, and shipping misses the carrier cut-off. The cost is a day of orders, not a support ticket.
We monitor the infrastructure underneath it rather than waiting for someone to say it feels slow, and we take slowness seriously as a fault in its own right, because in a warehouse it is one.
Cross-border and the maquila supply chain
A great many El Paso distributors have a counterpart operation in Ciudad Juárez, and the two have to behave like one business.
That means shared systems, a connection between the sites that is monitored rather than assumed, and support in Spanish on both sides of the border. TechBit Solutions delivers support in Spanish as standard.
There is more detail on the Ciudad Juárez page.
Peak season and the cut-off
Distribution has a rhythm, and the worst possible time for a change is the week volume doubles.
We plan maintenance around your calendar rather than ours. That means asking when your peak runs, when the carrier cut-offs are each day, and which shifts cannot be interrupted. Patching and upgrades then land in the windows that exist rather than the ones that would be convenient for us.
It also means being deliberately quiet during peak. Anything that is not urgent waits, and anything that is urgent gets more people on it than usual.
Getting started
The first visit is a walk of the building with a measuring tool, because the answer to most warehouse questions is on the warehouse floor rather than in the server room.
Call TechBit Solutions at (915) 629-8888.
Questions we get asked
Our scanners drop out in one aisle. Is that fixable?
Almost always, and almost never by adding another access point at random. It needs measuring first, because the usual causes are interference or coverage that was designed for an empty building rather than a full one.
Can you support our ERP?
We support the infrastructure it runs on and we take the call when it is slow or down. Where the fault belongs to the software vendor we deal with them rather than handing you their number.
We have a plant in Juárez. Can you cover both sides?
Yes. Cross-border operations are a normal part of our work and we support them in both English and Spanish. There is a page about it.
What happens if the warehouse system goes down mid-shift?
Call. Anything that stops shipping is treated as stopping the business. We answer in minutes during our hours and the after-hours line reaches a person outside them. We are minutes away from most of El Paso's industrial corridors, which matters more than any promise on paper when a shift is standing still.
Do you work with barcode and label printers?
Yes. They are unglamorous and they stop the line as effectively as anything else does.