National Labor Organization Transforms Legacy Network to Power Mission-Critical Operations

Customer

A large North American labor organization, representing more than 1 million members, operates hundreds of local offices across the United States and its territories. These offices play a vital role in negotiating contracts, advocating for workers’ rights, managing benefits, and ensuring compliance with labor agreements. The organization’s mission is to negotiate contracts that guarantee its 1.2 million members decent wages, fair promotion, health coverage, job security, paid time-off, and retirement income.

To support financial operations across its distributed footprint, the organization relies on a centralized enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that connects each local office to national headquarters.

Challenge

One of the organization’s most essential responsibilities is collecting and processing member dues. Each local office submits financial data to headquarters through a centralized ERP platform—making reliable connectivity non-negotiable.

However, the underlying network infrastructure was built on a legacy MPLS system that had become increasingly unreliable and underpowered. Local offices experienced:

• Severe bandwidth limitations (as low as 128 Kbps upload/download speeds)
• Frequent service outages
• Sluggish application performance
• Growing difficulty supporting modern cloud-based workloads
• Little to no responsive customer support from the incumbent provider

The situation became more urgent when a new version of the ERP system was scheduled for rollout—one that required significantly more bandwidth and greater reliability. Leadership recognized that their existing infrastructure would not only fail to support future demands but was already putting daily operations at risk.

Equally concerning was the lack of dependable service support. When issues arose, there was no clear escalation path and no consistent accountability. The organization needed more than a technology upgrade. It needed a long-term managed services partner committed to reliability, scalability, and responsive support.

Solution

The organization selected Hughes as their Managed Service Provider (MSP), in part due to the company’s “Go the Extra Mile” customer service philosophy. In addition to careful proactive planning, thorough communication, and watchful execution, Hughes provides 24x7x365 service from not one, but four Enterprise Support Centers (ESCs). Embodying the spirit of “anytime, anywhere” availability, this kind of infrastructure enables Hughes personnel to handle customer interactions whenever and wherever a customer may need help.

As for the network itself, the organization selected a Hughes Managed Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) to replace its outdated MPLS system. Since Hughes is the largest non-carrier provider of enterprise connectivity in North America, with access to more than 450 carrier partners of all types, each location can select the broadband transport type and speed to meet its unique needs.

In light of the previous provider’s termination penalties, the organization chose not to cancel the incumbent contracts prematurely. Instead, Hughes has partnered with the organization to manage the transition and, as contracts expire, individual sites transition from MPLS to Hughes Managed SD-WAN.

The Hughes deployment plan followed a phased approach:

• 88 sites during Phase 1
• 144 sites during Phase 2
• 122 sites during Phase 3

This approach minimized financial risk while accelerating performance improvements where they were needed most.

Outcome

The Hughes Managed SD-WAN solution includes:

• “Fast, faster, fastest” broadband by area. To streamline the broadband identification process at each local site, Hughes utilizes a tool that gleans data from thousands of service deployments to provide rank choice recommendations. This way, Hughes serves up local transport information––automatically, quickly, and efficiently––solving the challenge of identifying which fiber, cable, and DSL broadband services are available at each of the organization’s sites so the local representatives can choose among “fast, faster, fastest” broadband options.
• Backup connectivity with automatic fail-over in the event of an outage. Built-in redundancy ensures that if one connection experiences an outage, traffic automatically reroutes to backup connectivity, which maintains uninterrupted access to critical applications.
• Because early contract termination penalties were significant, the organization opted for a strategic, phased transition. As legacy contracts expire, sites are systematically migrated to the new SD-WAN platform.
• Network management, spanning installation, proactive monitoring, and fast remediation―all automated via Hughes artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and augmented on-location, when needed, with a nationwide team of field service technicians.
• Hughes Enterprise Support Centers operating 24x7x365 at geographically dispersed locations for redundancy, staffed by support professionals offering multilingual assistance.
• Access to the HughesON™ portal for visibility into the ordering and install process, as well as “Day 2” updates confirming when a particular site is up and running. The portal offers the customer organization a self-help option in addition to calling for Help Desk support.

Get more information about the suite of Hughes Managed Network Services.