Customer Overview
YAI is a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to providing essential services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. With locations across New York, New Jersey, and California, YAI supports more than 20,000 individuals with a team of 4,000+ employees. One of YAI’s cornerstone services is community-integrated, supportive housing, and the organization operates 150+ housing locations across New York City. YAI also empowered people with disabilities to greater independence through technology education, making reliable internet a must-have at every supportive housing location.
Key Challenges & Objectives
YAI has grown quickly in the past decade, but with that growth has come new challenges with connectivity. With more than 150 locations across the five boroughs, managing internet service providers had become a logistical nightmare. The fragmented connectivity picture included dozens of different account numbers and authorized users with a variety of internet providers, as well as monthly bills for circuits that were no longer in use but had never been canceled.
This meant YAI staff were often taking precious time away from clinical and education work to track down billing information and troubleshoot router issues. When the internet was down at a housing location, it disrupted YAI’s support services and often took away their residents’ only means of contacting their family and friends.
When they called DMS Tech Advisors, YAI had two requests:
- Reliable internet services at all of their housing locations
- A streamlined system so their staff aren’t wasting time managing support tickets
DMS Tech Advisors Solution
DMS Tech Advisors took a multi-step approach to ensure we met both goals of internet uptime and administrative optimization.
Step 1: Needs Assessment
We sat down with key leaders and staff from YAI to understand the current services they were using, their most frustrating pain points, and — most importantly — their organizational workflows and goals. From here, we identified service support gaps and inconsistencies across YAI’s various New York locations.
Step 2: Services and Billing Audit
Next, our Tech Advisors took a deeper dive to analyze YAI’s current carrier services and contracts. We conducted a comprehensive audit of all existing internet services and network configurations. During this process, we identified unused auxiliary services and unnecessary expenses at multiple locations.
Step 3: Managed Service Transition
To improve support responsiveness and operational visibility, we transitioned YAI’s internet services into a fully managed structure, putting all ISP agreements under both YAI’s organization and our management framework. This enabled centralized support coordination, streamlined provider communication, and faster issue resolution across all locations.
Step 4: Network Design and Optimization
We secured updated pricing quotes from the vendors best-suited for YAI’s bandwidth needs and, where necessary, we upgraded network hardware and installed modern infrastructure equipment to support improved performance and security. This included deploying redundant internet circuits from different providers to improve uptime and service continuity.
Step 5: Ongoing Management and Support
Finally, we centralized billing, account management, and service documentation into a unified system. This created a single source of truth for all locations and immediately improved visibility into services and costs. Our team remains on call to manage trouble tickets as needs arise. In most cases, we’re able to deploy a technician within one business day.
Result
Today, DMS operates a fully managed network solution, allowing for DMS Tech Advisors to directly handle support issues. This has cut response time on support tickets from hours to less than 30 minutes. Each YAI location now has redundant circuits for maximum uptime, with unused services and accounts canceled for immediate cost savings. Because DMS has all internet account information on file, there’s no more wasted energy tracking down account numbers. As YAI continues to grow, adding a new location is a simple, streamlined process.
The Human Approach to Tech
DMS helps you design and deploy a network solution that ensures maximum uptime, coverage, security, and reliability. We specialize in solving connectivity issues for multi-location organizations with industry-leading solutions including SD-WAN, and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) frameworks. We handle internet connectivity so you can focus on your core business.
When you work with us, you get more than technical expertise — you get a human-focused team that listens first and builds customized solutions around your people and organizational goals. Get in touch to learn more.
