Case Studies

Shell Energy

Firm Size: 1,070 employees

Sector: Utilities

Turnover: £858m

Project: Infrastructure implementation and support

What was the challenge?

Due to rapid expansion of the business, and the almost doubling of customer’s year on year, the IT teams were finding it harder and harder to identify, acquire and manage their Wide Area Network (WAN) assets. Initially they had a direct Wholesale relationship with Openreach, however, the support and maintenance of the service was complex and time consuming, even though the costs were excellent. As additional sites, both office assets and data centre assets, were being added no cohesive strategy for survey of sites or availability of services was being given consideration.

How it was met:

Serviceteam IT, in partnership with Virgin Media Business (VMB), Vodafone (Cable & Wireless), Wavenet and Exponential-e along with Northway Communications identified: site fibre, diverse routes for high availability, best cost carrier and additional services delivery through backhauls and Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN).

The two data centre sites, the IT Services site, the Call Centre site and the Head Quarters are all linked via a mesh of 1Gbps circuits with wholly diverse fibre to site and the fibre routes. Additional Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) are implemented for:

- high capacity Internet and Wide Area Network access via Fibre Ethernet and Smart Network
- access to third party IP Telephony services
- Local Area Network (LAN) extensions linking the Contact Centre and the Head Quarters to IT Services via Smart Network
- dedicated Cloud Connect access to a multiple Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) located with Amazon Web Services (AWS) via a, private and secure Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) with Smart Network

GAB Robins

Firm Size: 500+ employees

Sector: Insurance

Turnover: £72m

Project: Process optimisation

What was the challenge?

GAB were using an existing service provided by another organisation which was based upon an electronic pen coupled with a paper form. The paper forms cost over £40K per annum in prints, were not flexible, slow to change and caused delays if a major event, such as a flood or heavy snow, required more ‘forms’.

The pen was sometimes inaccurate and the output was often incomplete. They therefore required a service, which replaced the exiting data capture by the front-line claims managers without re-engineering all of the backend, such as DMS and claims systems, many of which were bespoke or customer specific.

How it was met:

Introduction of Windows based Tablets, electronic forms using InfoPath and SharePoint Server 2010 as the ‘middleware’. This approach was adopted following a six-month Proof of Concept using Office 365 and was finally implemented based upon ease of adoption, limited development required, extensible and ease of integration with existing systems.

OCR
Oxford, Cambridge and RSA

Firm Size: 503 employees

Sector: Education

Turnover: £93m

Project: Website optimisation for easier access to information

What was the challenge?

The proliferation of social media and the needs of generation Y promise to revolutionise teaching and learning in the twenty-first century. Sadly, no real consensus exists on how to introduce Web technologies into an educational context, although it is important that educators play a key role in determining and evaluating the uses and implications of social media.

The potential for blogging in education is large, as it allows closed user group dissemination of information, control over content and perceived practice plus it enables educational organisations to display their knowledge, skills and experience through Social Media channels building their own reputation, not the Social Media platform.

How it was met:

By introduction of a CMS platform using WordPress. This approach was adopted following a month long Proof of Concept which identified greatest accessibility, ease of use for authors and the best extensibility for future development in data management and dissemination of information.

LPR
La Palette Rouge

Firm Size: 50 employees

Sector: Logistics

Turnover: €105m

Project: Data Management

What was the challenge?

The existing SAP system was unable to provide accurate invoices to customers. This was creating a backlog of old debt and a time critical issue of upcoming debt. The problem was being analysed and dealt with manually, and taking a great deal of time. They expected to replace the SAP system with Dynamics AX in the following 24 months.

How it was met:

Serviceteamit took away the data export from SAP and analysed as an overview. It was found they had a £4.25M ‘hole’ of old debt and debt due. A bespoke application was written and delivered to the customer in one week, which enabled import of current, and future data to transform and segment in order to automatically create whole organisation invoices in minutes. Using Office 365 the application was built in Excel as this was a customer preference.

Taif Gulf

Firm Size: 15 employees

Sector: Professional Services

Turnover: Undisclosed

Project: Global web experience optimisation and hosting

What was the challenge?

Due to the global nature of the client base, delivering an excellent website experience was challenging to achieve and far too expensive to apply. The existing site, hosted in the USA, had acceptable user experience for North American and most European users; however, local users in the Gulf and investors from the Far East found the experience less fulfilling and not a true representation of Taif Gulf Properties.

How it was met:

The main challenge was enabling fast page load times in all major cities around the globe.

In order to localise the user experience we deployed the primary host site within our own data centre infrastructure in the United Kingdom, giving us direct control of the hosts to ensure High Availability and simplified management using Smart Network. We then over-laid a global CDN service, which localised the content to most cities throughout the world. Now, when a user accesses the site from Dubai to New York, Muscat to Shanghai and London to Moscow the content is delivered by a local server with minimal latency.

Shell Energy

GAB Robins

OCR Oxford, Cambridge and RSA

LPR La Palette Rouge

Taif Gulf

OCR
Oxford, Cambridge and RSA

LPR
La Palette Rouge