Mid America Pet Food produces premium dog and cat food at its manufacturing facility in East Texas. Its operations run on a technical infrastructure that most companies its size would struggle to manage, including security cameras, VLANs that segment traffic across PLCs and production equipment, and multiple wireless access points that support the facility floor. Factor in roughly 200 employee PCs and a virtualized server environment running on several Hyper-V hosts, and the management becomes more than what a small IT team can realistically handle alone.
When Director of IT Don Dixon joined Mid America Pet Food as IT Manager in January 2020, the company's entire internal IT department consisted of a single Level 1 technician, with help from Sagiss, the company's managed service provider (MSP). That single technician was responsible for onboarding, offboarding, and day-to-day troubleshooting, while Sagiss covered the infrastructure and security work the one-person internal team didn't have the bandwidth or specialization to handle.
The arrangement was generally adequate, but manufacturing companies carry a heavier IT support burden than most businesses. Insurance requirements and ownership mandates require constant attention to cybersecurity, and someone needs to monitor the physical security systems around the clock. On top of that, Dixon's team also fields last-minute requests that go above and beyond routine maintenance, like rapidly deploying a job fair registration site on a Friday afternoon or building other custom solutions.
A single technician, no matter how capable, can't single-handedly create and maintain the layered infrastructure a facility like Mid America Pet Food needs, and Sagiss had already been providing much-needed reinforcement before Dixon arrived. That’s where Dixon saw an opportunity for change. Rather than leaning on Sagiss to cover whatever the internal team couldn't get to, build an internal team with the staffing and knowledge to own the company's daily IT work, and reserve Sagiss for the specialized, higher-level support only an MSP could justify staffing for.
Over the next several years, Dixon expanded Mid America Pet Food's IT department from one technician to four — two frontline help desk technicians, one team member focused on development work, and Dixon himself. That growth enabled the company to bring a larger share of its routine IT responsibilities in-house, handling onboarding, offboarding, and troubleshooting at a scale one technician couldn't sustain, plus the day-to-day tasks that used to spill over to Sagiss whenever the internal team ran out of bandwidth.
Rather than ending the company’s partnership with Sagiss, the expanded IT team changed the relationship dynamics. Sagiss stepped into the role of Tier 3 support, managing backups, taking care of server patching, and covering overflow capacity whenever Dixon's team needed additional hands.
Now, beyond that baseline, Sagiss builds custom group policies, manages identity systems, and implements the security tools and infrastructure improvements a four-person team would otherwise find it challenging to prioritize while providing daily support. That division of labor isn't fixed, either. It shifts as Dixon's team's capabilities grow, giving Dixon the flexibility to keep every support base covered.
Dixon said that over the years, Sagiss has consistently proven its worth as an MSP partner, demonstrating technical expertise, responsiveness, trustworthiness, and a collaborative approach that continues to strengthen the partnership.
During quarterly onsite visits, Sagiss representatives and Dixon’s team review ongoing projects, update documentation, and plan upcoming initiatives together. Dixon considers these meetings especially valuable, as they enable the company’s IT support services to be proactive by solving problems before they surface, rather than reacting after something goes wrong.
Dixon says one particular improvement stands out. Sagiss wrote a script that locks a terminated employee's device the instant HR finalizes the termination. Before that, Dixon's team had no choice but to monitor devices manually to prevent unauthorized access after someone left the company. Sagiss also helped segment Mid America Pet Food's wireless network into separate guest, employee, and high-priority tiers and added vendor isolation on top.
Today, Dixon's IT team and Sagiss jointly support Mid America Pet Food’s IT environment, which includes roughly 200 PCs, nearly 100 security cameras, more than 50 wireless access points, and seven Hyper-V hosts running 40 to 50 virtual servers across an eight-VLAN network.
Managing an infrastructure this far-flung and complex without a capable internal team would strain many manufacturing companies. Managing it without a capable managed service provider lending its expertise and staff hours would strain this one. The co-managed model gives Mid America Pet Food both an internal team that handles day-to-day IT support and understands the manufacturing business and an MSP partner that provides advanced technical assistance when it's required.
Dixon's team has also grown more confident in the relationship over time, seeing Sagiss as an extension of their own department rather than an outside vendor they have to manage.
For a company where security cameras, access control, and production equipment reside on the same network as email and file servers, trust like this is essential. Insufficient IT coverage risks both physical security and production uptime, which is why Dixon has been deliberate about which responsibilities his team handles in-house and which they entrust to a partner with the expertise and bandwidth to support them.
Four years ago, the department consisted of a single technician covering the company’s entire infrastructure with Sagiss's help. Today, the four-person IT department and Sagiss work side by side, proving that growing an internal IT department and keeping a strong MSP relationship aren't mutually exclusive goals.