How Parker Steel Company Runs Enterprise-Grade IT as a Team of One

The Challenge

When Shawn joined Parker Steel, he inherited an IT environment built on manual processes. Device inventories lived in spreadsheets. Software queries had to be run by hand. Compliance documentation was tracked in binders and Word documents.

"Everything was very manual," Shawn explained. "Whether it was inventory, whether it was doing queries on the systems — it was all something that we had to tackle and log on a regular basis to make sure we could prove those things out."

For a company operating in a regulated industry with traceability requirements tied to U.S. Customs certification and Department of Defense contracts, that paper trail wasn't optional. But maintaining it ate up time Shawn didn't have to spare.

To take some of the load off, Parker Steel turned to Electric for about two years. The pitch was familiar: outsource the tickets, free up the IT person to focus on higher-level work.

It didn't work out that way.

"So many of the tickets just came back to me anyway," Shawn said. "It actually consumed more time doing that than it did before."

The core problem was Parker Steel's niche. As a metric metal distributor with specific traceability and certification requirements, the environment was too specialized for a generalist help desk to handle effectively. Electric could field Windows questions, but those were the easy ones — the kind Shawn could knock out while walking by someone's desk. The harder, context-specific issues always found their way back to him.

After two years, Shawn stepped back and evaluated. He needed something that didn't just hand tickets to someone else. He needed automation that eliminated the tickets in the first place.

The Solution

Visitors who evaluate Parker Steel's IT environment often come in expecting something modest — a 45-person distributor, one IT person, limited resources. What they find instead is a security posture and tech stack that surprises them.

"People come in shocked when they realize what we have in place with only 45 employees," Shawn said. "Especially when it comes to cybersecurity."

Some of that is a product of deliberate investment. Some of it is Rippling helping Shawn do the work of a much larger team. And that manifests in all kinds of ways, from the exciting – like the platform’s new AI capabilities – to the basic and foundational, like documentation. 

"It's probably the documentation that I'm saving the most time on," he said, "because Rippling is really doing a lot of that for me. It's constantly updating what's going on with each system. I'm not having to go in and keep updating manually where things sit."

For a one-person IT department responsible for proving compliance to auditors, that continuous, automated record-keeping isn't a nice-to-have. It's the bedrock of a secure environment.

On top of that, with Rippling's MDM in place, Shawn no longer has to manually scan machines to find out what software is installed. The data is just there. And after beta-testing Rippling AI, it’s gotten even easier to use. 

“I say, 'I need all the systems that are under this threshold,' and it gives me all the systems at that level or below with the software package,” Shawn explains. “Then I can go out and update those things — hopefully before users even know there's an issue."

As he continued to query the AI, Shawn found all the more sophisticated use cases, including managing a software bug. A known issue in one of their applications was generating log files that would silently fill up a machine's entire disk. Left undetected, it would eventually grind a user's computer to a halt.

Shawn set up a Rippling AI query to monitor disk space thresholds across all devices on a continuous basis. 

"I only knew of it affecting one or two computers," Shawn said. "But I kept the query running so I could monitor all the systems and see which ones were hitting the threshold. I could address it before the user even knew there was an issue."

That AI use case went well beyond Parker Steel's walls. Shawn shared it publicly, and soon found other IT professionals reaching out on LinkedIn asking how he pulled it off.

For Shawn, the broader value of Rippling AI isn't about any single query. It's about being able to ask the system a question in plain language and get an answer, rather than having to build and run complex manual queries every time.

I don't have to go digging for it. I can just ask the AI, 'find this for me,' move on to something else for a second, look back, and it's there.

Ask Shawn about his biggest win since adopting Rippling, and he'll point to something that has nothing to do with a specific feature.

"That's going to point back to the Wavemakers group," he said, referencing Rippling's customer community. "That's something I've always found benefit in — a software company that really values what its customers say."

For Shawn, who has been part of software user groups for decades, Rippling's feedback loop stands out. Product requests don't disappear into a void. They show up in future releases. That responsiveness, he says, makes him want to invest more deeply in the platform.

"That draws me into wanting to use them more," he said. "Rather than a software company who thinks they're making the best product out there but never takes feedback from a customer. It’s a massive difference.”