Engineering Firm
Aulick Engineering is a women-owned small business based in the Atlanta area with offices in North and South Carolina. Aulick provides engineering design and construction management services for transportation and site-related projects. The firm’s primary focus is hydrology/hydraulics, roadway drainage, erosion control, storm water management, airport inspection and more.
Since its founding in 2011, Aulick Engineering has seen significant growth. What started as a single-person firm has flourished into a team of 40 professionals made up of engineering design, administrative support and construction inspection staff. The firm prides itself in producing a high-quality product while maintaining dependable and client-focused relationships by following our core values of being kind, resourceful, respectful and trustworthy.
The Challenge
For larger engineering firms, an IT pro on staff is fairly routine. Aulick vice president Kate Henry explains that the confidence and familiarity that comes from personally knowing your company’s “IT guy” lends a level of trust you just don’t get when outsourcing that function. It’s a partnership between colleagues. In smaller firms like Aulick, dedicating a staff position to IT oftentimes isn’t feasible. When things go wrong or equipment needs upgrades, they need to rely on outside people to get the job done. Many times, that sense of partnership isn’t there. It’s a leap of faith for a company that performs complex functions like computer-aided drafting with an on-site server as its bread and butter.
In addition to the trust factor, with no IT pro on staff, it’s difficult to stay on top of the latest advancements in technology or get recommendations for features that might work better for a company’s specific needs. Logic Speak helped change all of that.
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The Solution
Although Logic Speak is an outside vendor, they are a true partner to Aulick Engineering, Henry explains. The dedicated team at Logic Speak has come to feel like extensions of their own staff. The personal aspect of getting to know the team has been an important part of the trust, confidence and ease of working with Logic Speak.
Henry explains Aulick has formed an internal projects group, in which they aggregate IT issues that multiple people on staff have been experiencing. Then they take those issues to the Logic Speak team to help find a solution to a common problem. A part of that has been the Logic Speak client success team, which has regular meetings with Aulick to touch base on what’s working and what could be improved upon. Close communication has been a key element to that success.
But, the relationship is deeper than simply fixing problems when they arise. Henry explains Logic Speak really knows Aulick’s business and has made (and continues to make) recommendations based on their needs, what’s happening in the marketplace and what may happen in the future. Technology is changing all the time, and it’s not Aulick’s business to keep on top of that. It’s Logic Speak’s. “Jason (Etheridge, Logic Speak’s president and founder) is passionate about staying in the forefront of tech advancements,” she says.
The Results
One way Henry saw the value and power of personalized outsourcing with Logic Speak was during the pandemic. Logic Speak’s recommendation of using a remote (cloud) server rather than one onsite put them ahead of the game when the country went into lockdown.
“When we hit the pandemic, I felt like we were ahead of probably over 90% of our industry because we already had the ability to work remotely,” she says. “We already had a remote server. We had been doing things like automatically updating files on our computer to the network. So many engineering companies were not there and fumbled through VPN access. Because of the position Logic Speak had put us in, we went seamlessly to working from home.”
Whatever the problem or stumbling block Aulick experiences because of IT issues, including those associated with complicated engineering software, the company knows Logic Speak will be there to collaborate on getting the job done.
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