• Evaluates your technology in terms of specific business goals;
• Aligns your IT systems with best practices and accepted methodologies;
• Monitors your technology around the clock to provide a proactive response;
• Provides your company with scheduled support and maintenance;
• Builds relationships with your vendors and suppliers;
• Delivers service to remediate a problem, onsite or remotely;
• Prevents future problems by consulting with your company and updating documentation.

ParleeStumpf Embraces Managed IT Services

Traditionally, an advertising agency deals with ideas, pitching them, sketching them, concentrating on client marketing strategies and designing a wide range of materials to further that goal.

How times have changed. Technology is driving business into new digital realms and traditions are falling by the wayside. The advertising agency still deals in ideas, but those ideas are expressed in huge graphic files, files so critical to the agency and client that they need to be managed properly and securely. Web site design and interactive projects, along with search engine optimization (SEO) for clients, are top agency priorities.

Todd Parlee, who began as a graphic designer and rose to head the interactive division at ParleeStumpf—Marketing, Branding & Interactive Consultants in Doylestown, where he is now senior partner, knows the importance of technology management. “We have a ton of huge design files. We need access to that information all the time, and we need to have redundancy on backups,” Parlee said.

Without question, it’s imperative for the agency to have a stable online connection. Parlee notes, “With SEO, which is a large part of our business, we need to pay close attention to systems. The integrity of our client, their files and their success is at stake.”

Five years ago, to manage the agency’s technology, Parlee purchased blocks of engineering time from DocuTech and approached network issues on a project basis. “I would think – why do I even do this? You get lulled into a comfort level,” thinking things are fine with the network, but behind the scenes, there is a lot going on, and you just never know when something will break or go down, he explained.

Parlee said “it made sense” to switch to Connected Care two years ago when DocuTech proposed to convert the agency to managed IT services. This proactive program provides maintenance and network monitoring with continued service improvement to achieve a highly stable, dependable IT environment.

“Our technology is constantly updated and monitored, and DocuTech is keeping an eye on our systems, making sure they are moving and working properly. Essentially, we have had very few issues because of what’s going on” to upgrade, monitor and maintain the agency’s IT systems, Parlee said. Moreover, DocuTech married the company’s PC and Mac-based systems, “getting the two systems to play nicely.”

“Whenever we need updates, or find glitches, we call DocuTech’s phone support. It doesn’t matter who we get, we get an answer right away,” Parlee said.

And more technology leaps may be in ParleeStumpf’s future: Parlee has his eyes on the cloud for backups. While DocuTech currently maintains an internal tape backup system for the agency, Parlee says “we might go on the cloud” some time in the future to backup files online to a secure server.

As to the costs for Connected Care, Parlee says they are level with the block-of-time approach. “It evens out, but the results are much better, with fewer issues,” he said. “I think we are getting a substantial return on investment, and I’m sleeping much better at night to boot!”

DocuTech Recommends

DocuTech makes it a point to recommend ParleeStumpf — Marketing, Branding & Interactive Consultants — to customers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. And ParleeStumpf often returns the favor.

“Our business relationship is supported by a mutual business philosophy that guarantees customer satisfaction,” said Howard Podgurski, DocuTech president.

Todd Parlee, senior partner at ParleeStumpf, agrees wholeheartedly. “We have a great working business relationship with DocuTech.”

For more than two decades, ParleeStumpf, formerly Michael J. Stumpf & Associates, has provided marketing and advertising campaigns to local, regional and international clients.  A strategic branding consultancy, ParleeStumpf offers disciplined consultation and creative services designed to help consumer and business to business companies of all sizes build and reinforce their brands.

Specializing in marketing, branding and interactive consulting, the agency serves a wide range of industries including financial services, healthcare, education, manufacturing, retail, hospitality and not for profits. Using a comprehensive array of integrated creative services, ParleeStumpf helps clients reach their objectives regarding web site and interactive development, search engine optimization, direct mail, collateral, publications and broadcast media.

ParleeStumpf is located at Penn’s Court, Suite 113, 350 South Main Street in Doylestown, PA. For more information about the agency and to review selected clients and projects, call 215.345.7040 or visit their web site at parleestumpf.com.

Tech Tip: Counting One Specific Word in a Document

Maybe you’re optimizing your text or trying not to be redundant, but sometimes you need to know how often you've used a particular word in a Microsoft Word document, or even in a part of a document. Since the Word Count tool won’t search on a specific word, here is a workaround:

1. If you want to count only in a particular area of your document, select the text you want included in the count.
2. Press Ctrl+H, or choose Replace from the Edit menu. Word displays the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
3. In the Find What box, enter the word you want to count. In the Replace With box, enter the same word.
4. Click Replace All.

Word replaces all instances of the word with itself, so really there are no changes made to your document. However, a dialog box indicates how many changes were performed — this is your word count.