Making Connections: Mid Michigan Community Action overcomes internet issues, improves efficiencies

The team at Mid Michigan Community Action did the best they could to maintain communication with one another and keep operations moving smoothly at the organization’s food distribution warehouse and food pantry. The facility houses items distributed to 3,000 elderly community members each month.

But for a long time, team members struggled with spotty connectivity issues which inevitably led to inefficiencies and a whole lot of frustration, said Mark Polega, operations director of Mid Michigan Community Action, a human services nonprofit which has more than a dozen locations and serves individuals and families in eight counties across the Great Lakes state.

“Our warehouse, despite being less than a mile from the administration offices, sits in some weird Bermuda Triangle for internet,” Mark said, citing the building’s proximity to both a river and railroad tracks as potential contributors to the connectivity issues. “They felt cut off from the world. But it was going to cost us $85,000 to run a line to improve the connection.”

Mid Michigan Community Action is dedicated to empowering neighborhoods and eliminating poverty. The organization has programs and services for economic security, children and families, housing, veterans, seniors, and youth, as well as coronavirus resources.

The Road to Greater Bandwidth

As the organization’s IT partners, the technology solutions team at Rehmann “worked tirelessly to try to identify different options that might work,” Mark said. “They did so much of that legwork for me, which was amazing, and none of those ended up panning out, unfortunately. But we just recently were able to figure out a different kind of service through Verizon, and what really struck me was the minute we identified that, and I talked with the Rehmann team about it, even though it wasn’t a Rehmann-identified solution or a Rehmann product, they were all over it. They understood how critical it was to get that bandwidth.”

Julianna from Rehmann really understood what we were dealing with and the problems we were dealing with. You just don’t get that kind of service everywhere, especially for something that was not Rehmann’s product. But she made it happen. That was incredibly cool and within a couple of days we had everything worked out. A Rehmann engineer coordinated with Verizon.”

Improvements All Around

Several days into the much-improved connectivity, Mark said operations were running more smoothly.

“What it has meant for us so far is our warehouse manager is able to stay on site. A lot of times, she was having to come down to the administration offices, away from her staff, to do food ordering and reports – it was taking her off site, which was tough. And the other major thing it has done is it has restored communication with all of our delivery drivers – the warehouse had been having a heck of a time taking calls from delivery drivers and customers needing to access the food pantry. It’s eased some tension there.”