X-Mil Inc

About X-Mil Inc

Shop owners are all too familiar with long hours, late nights, and the harsh demands of running a successful business. In order to keep the jobs flowing through the shop, it takes an intense amount of work on the back end. Erica Carpenter, quality manager for X-Mil, Inc., recalls a childhood where she came to the shop after school and her father slept on the couch in his office to get work done through the night. Their family life revolved around the shop, and that’s an experience many other shop-owning families faced as well.

However, things are different for Carpenter and her own children. The web-based E2 SHOP software allows Carpenter to work from anywhere, so she and the kids are not chained to the shop. She can work from home, the sidelines of sporting events, or even the lake!

This type of freedom gives Carpenter the chance to have the best of both worlds; she gets to devote herself to her job as well as her family without having to pick and choose.

While Carpenter was always drawn towards the remote access of SHOP, she, like many shop managers, was concerned about releasing X-Mil’s data to another location. “There is a lot of fear, especially for the owners of a company, who are used to having everything on our own internal servers,” said Carpenter. “So the idea of moving to the cloud is kind of scary.” Despite these initial fears, Carpenter decided to look further into the issue, rather than dismiss the idea of a web-based software entirely. She feels very fortunate that she did because she learned that their data would not be floating around in the cloud with everyone else. Instead, their information would lay on a dedicated server monitored by Rackspace, an industry-leading cybersecurity company.

Having a professional cybersecurity company monitoring X-Mil’s data was not the only aspect of E2 SHOP that helps Carpenter sleep easy. She also loves the automatic backup feature of the system. For years, Carpenter would copy all the shop’s data on a flash drive every night before heading home. However, that’s a difficult routine to maintain. “The night that I forget my flash drive,” said Carpenter, “I drove here at 2 o’clock in the morning and I was in a panic mode.” With SHOP’s automatic backups and separate hosting environment, Carpenter doesn’t have to fear that an office fire, flooding, or another catastrophe will cripple their business.

Other automatic features include updates, which happen regularly without halting the operation. Carpenter explained that she receives an email telling her an update is going to happen, but she otherwise wouldn’t even know the updates were occurring. The process is smooth, seamless, and leaves the system intact. Carpenter and all other shop owners do not want to deal with production slowdowns, even if that means getting the most current updates in the system. Now, she is able to keep the shop floor running and stay up to date with the latest aspects of E2.