IT Support, Outsourcing and Service Case Studies

Solicitors Practice

The business is a large solicitors practice with 200 IT users spread over 4 sites in the UK and Ireland.  All software applications are hosted centrally and delivered using terminal services to remote offices.  Smart IT manage and support the network, servers, users and devices and interface with network operators, application vendors and the practice users.  Smart IT inherited all infrastructure but have made significant improvements to service elements such as back up, web content filtering, security and application delivery which used to be problematic.  This has allowed the practice to operate very successfully with just one junior technician who works under the direction of the Smart IT service desk. Smart IT have significantly improved the quality of service received by users and allowed the practice to reduce the internal IT headcount bringing an estimated saving of over £200k over 3 years.

Fashion Design and Manufacturing

The company is a leading name in fashion design with 150 UK-based IT users and a further 1000 based in offices around the world.  Smart IT are retained to support and maintain all UK and North African users and servers, and this includes the company’s ERP application which is key to users worldwide. The company was struggling with an increasingly obsolete Windows NT operating system and as part of the service initiation Smart IT rolled out Active Directory services. This new system had dependencies with servers in the company’s overseas offices, so the task was complex and involved no less than 10 different IT teams. It was coordinated wholly by Smart IT and was delivered without a minute’s downtime. 

 Smart IT’s services allow the company to operate in a difficult, highly security-sensitive, worldwide environment with just one UK based developer.  Previously the company had required a small team of IT staff plus associated facilities.  They were relatively expensive, under utilised and inexperienced when it came to new technology.  Smart IT have saved the company £90k in the first year and significantly increased the IT skills, experience and know how available to the customer.

Manufacturing

The company is a world leader in the manufacturing of specialist engineering tools.  They have 100 UK-based IT users with offices worldwide.  In this case the main software package being used is Microsoft Navision. It is delivered using Citrix from a data centre in Germany.  The UK site has servers for local file and printer sharing as well as legacy systems used for historic data queries.  Smart IT maintains the site in its entirety – there are no internal onsite IT service personnel. To achieve this Smart IT have created interfaces with the UK users for user support, the German IT support and development team for Navision support and all of the other overseas offices for connectivity. In short, the company has outsourced its entire UK IT support operation to Smart IT.  Project initiation saw Smart IT resolve a long standing connectivity issue to one part of the plant in the UK which had caused operational inefficiencies and is estimated to have saved the business £50K over 6 months. 

Charity

This is a local charity with IT 50 users based on a single site.  Smart IT maintain the site in its entirety, liaising with the clients appointed representative and providing management reports to the board of trustees every 12 weeks.  The site operates servers for mail, file, print and CRM services.

Before Smart IT, the charity was struggling with a new but badly implemented infrastructure which was giving a very unsatisfactory service to the charity’s users. For example, towards the end of their agreement with the supplier who had installed the infrastructure, the accounts department had resorted to using pen and paper.  As a result the client / supplier relationship was in complete tatters.  Furthermore, the charity had already spent the following year’s IT budget for improvements to try to make the new system functional. Thus Smart IT had to do without an equipment budget during their first year. Nevertheless, Smart IT undertook a comprehensive review of the current network, suggested improvements and executed a plan to stabilize it network using only equipment already onsite.  The new configuration was highly successful and resulted in a new found user confidence in the system.  Within a week everyone agreed that the system was now fit for purpose and that assistance from the service desk had improved vastly.  An indirect benefit of the initiation project was that users also received far less SPAM email and faster access to files and the CRM system.