How LANDSA helped a mid-market distributor go from break/fix firefighting to a secured, documented, AI-enabled operation
The Situation
A mid-market distribution company came to us with what looked like a people problem. Leadership believed their IT leader was competent but disengaged, slow to act, and not focused on the business. Orders were going out. The web store was running. Tablets worked in the field. The prevailing view: IT was basically handled. They just needed someone to keep the lights on.
There had been a ransomware incident earlier in the year. The previous IT administrator had dealt with it. Leadership considered it resolved.
None of this was accurate.
The Discovery
When we got in, we found a business running on institutional knowledge no one had written down, and a security incident that had been survived, not solved.
The operational reality:
- Their entire order pipeline ran on 53 Microsoft Access databases bolted onto their ERP system over ODBC. Not quirky-but-reliable. Corrupting themselves. Throwing errors. Needing manual restarts to keep orders flowing.
- No logging. No error handling. No documentation. When something broke, there was no way to know where or why.
- Everything lived in one departed administrator’s head. The definition of key-person risk.
- Product creation was broken. 105 orphaned items in the system with no owner.
The security reality:
- The ransomware incident had not been remediated. It had been survived. Forensics on the prior administrator’s machine turned up remote access backdoors installed on multiple systems, with recovery artifacts dated to the original attack window.
- There were no trustworthy backups.
- Plaintext credentials were sitting in source code. SQL injection exposure existed in the web store. Legacy malware was tucked into archived backups.
The finding that stopped the room:
Buried in the code were business rules no one had authorized and no one could explain. Financial logic. Customer exceptions. Hardcoded into VBA where no one would look. That conversation stopped being about IT and became about business controls.
The clincher was operational reality. When the order pipeline went down and stayed down for days, leadership watched the abstraction become concrete. No orders flowing means no fulfillment, no revenue, no working Tuesday. Suddenly those Access databases were not quirky. They were the thing standing between the company and a working week.
What Changed When LANDSA Got Involved
The engagement moved through three gears: see it, secure it, modernize it.
We made the invisible visible
We documented every system and dependency. Every database, every scheduled process, every hidden connection. The institutional knowledge that had lived in one person’s head is now written down. That alone ended the key-person hostage situation.
Then we went further. We built an AI-driven Operations Manual covering every business and technology practice in the company. Anyone on the team can now ask “What needs to be done for month end?” and receive a complete procedure covering business accounting and technology. Step by step. Specific to their environment. No more tribal knowledge. No more single point of failure.
We stopped trusting the past
We adopted a zero-trust migration policy. Pulled the backdoors. Removed legacy malware. Rebuilt the network with a proper zone-based firewall. Corrected payment processing. And built real backups for the first time, giving the company a trustworthy recovery foundation it had never had.
We stabilized the present and started building the future
We fixed the recurring failures in the order pipeline. Stood up monitoring so the team knows when something breaks before a customer does. Brought all hardware and software current.
Then we used AI to analyze the codebase and identify where to apply fixes first, prioritizing by business impact rather than working through a generic list. Modern replacements are now in development, built to retire the Access layer entirely. A demo unit is already in the field.
The Outcome
This company went from break/fix firefighting on an undocumented, partially compromised, single-point-of-failure environment to a documented, secured, backed-up, monitored operation with a modernization roadmap and an AI-driven Operations Manual its team can actually use.
The knowledge lives in the system now, not in someone’s head.
The Takeaway
Leadership thought they had a people problem. What they had was a documentation problem, a security problem, and a structural dependency on one person’s memory, all at once.
This is more common than most executives want to admit. The business runs, money comes in, so the assumption is that the plumbing is fine. It often isn’t. And the longer it runs undocumented and unexamined, the more expensive the eventual reckoning.
The question worth asking before you’re in that position: what’s one process in your business that only works because the right person happens to be there that day?
If this sounds familiar, we can help.