Relocating Headquarters and Building a Warehouse Network From the Ground Up
Problem
Regal Distributing relocated its headquarters and warehouse operations to a new 198,715 sq ft facility at 11280 Britton Street in Lenexa, KS, with a hard target of December 2025 through February 2026. That meant standing up an entire network and facility infrastructure from a blank slate — power, internet, WiFi, security systems — while simultaneously migrating three production Dell R660 servers running the company’s on-premises Active Directory domain, with zero tolerance for downtime to daily distribution operations. As a two-person IT team, I was responsible for the network design and infrastructure readiness across the entire project.
Approach
I designed and led implementation of a 12-section network plan covering the new facility end to end: 8 VLANs segmenting management, corporate office, warehouse operations, IoT sensors, security systems, and guest access; dual WAN from Spectrum and AT&T for redundancy; a Meraki MX85 firewall with default-deny rules; and NPS-authenticated WiFi to support warehouse scanning devices (Samsung tablets with ProGlove RF scanners) across a facility roughly 4x the footprint of the prior building.
The highest-risk piece was the AD domain migration — moving three live production servers without breaking authentication for the business. I scheduled that cutover for the Christmas shutdown window specifically to minimize business disruption, giving the migration a natural low-traffic window rather than forcing it into a live operational day.
I also coordinated across a full vendor stack — Smart Pro for pathways and cabling, Atronic for security, Herman Miller for furniture, SWC for AV — and used NetBox to document power distribution and network assets as the facility came online, so the new environment was documented from day one instead of retrofitted later.
Outcome
The new facility went live on the planned timeline with dual-ISP redundancy, a segmented and secured network design, and zero unplanned downtime to the on-premises AD domain during migration — a meaningful result for a lean, two-person team managing a facility-wide buildout end to end. The network design also anticipated growth: the facility supports the current staff footprint with clear headroom for the company’s continued expansion.
[Fill in: TCO/occupancy date achieved, any specific downtime avoided, or staff headcount at go-live if worth citing]