I.T
Cyber
Communications
Case Study
Care & Independence were previously four separate companies, which were purchased by an acquisition company and merged into one larger organisation to take on competitors in their industry. With offices in Ringwood, Bicester, Wigan and Glasgow the challenge was to combine the four business IT into one big system accessible for either of the sites and by remote staff. They required a new phone system that supported calls into multiple sites at once, due to having multiple team departments located in different areas. Some of their key requirements were:
The first step of the project was to analyse what the customer currently has, this ensures nothing is missed in the migration process. Oh-Tech worked with Care & Independence to review multiple avenues that best fit their requirements as a business as their main priorities, but also the plans for future growth.
Business areas we reviewed in the first stage:
A major discussion and the central focus point for the businesses was hosting. The initial in-house idea was to have the company’s main server at one of the larger sites. However, Oh-Tech raised potential issues of the site including loss of power or the internet which would have an overall knock-on effect to the 3 other sites and remote users. The business decided that the potential downtime was not worth the risk and that a new strategy was needed to make sure the system was robust and reliable.
Oh-Tech proposed a full cloud solution that would allow Care & Independence’s staff to work from anywhere with an internet connection. Oh-Tech also worked closely with Pinnacle who were chosen to be Care & Independence’s sage 200 Provider. Together we deployed the full sage200 suite to the hosted servers with multiple terminal servers for the staff to access.
Due to the sheer size of the ERP and merging all the data from four sites into one, the hosted server needed to be adequately scoped to make sure it could handle the day-to-day requirements of the 100+ users.
Failover of the cloud system was introduced. This meant that if the cloud server goes down for more than 15 minutes due to a power cut or internet outage, and the datacentre and redundancy machine which was on constant replication was introduced. Although very belt and bracers the business requested Oh-Tech to make sure that downtime was kept to a minimum due to the urgency of care to their customers.
The following was also completed as part of the merge:
After working closely with Care & Independence during this project, we ensured we were there every step of the way to make sure they were kept up to date and in the loop with every major change. Downtime was avoided where possible with weekend and evening work to reduce impact. Staff were given training on the new remote working system, this helped staff adapt to the new way of working whilst giving them that reassurance Oh-Tech was there if needed.
The business has now been successfully working on the cloud system for 4 years. The cloud platform has allowed them to expand their requirements for new users / data storage with ease.
We appointed Oh-Tech to carry out a complex upgrade and merger of our servers and computer systems. This work was carried out with a seamless transition and completed in the timescale set by Oh-Tech. Oh-Tech were onsite on the first live day for any teething problems. Since the system changeover Oh-Tech have continued to support our IT Systems day and night, and the level of service provided remains to be above and beyond what we could have expected. Excellent service
Ian Jones – Managing Director, Care & Independence
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