Search Consultancy
Increased efficiencies, stabiility and improved customer service through the introduction of Northgates Storage & Backup solutions along with an infrastructure upgrade and email migration solution.
As one of the UKs leading total recruitment solutions companies, Search provides clients with the complete range of recruitment outsourcing solutions from single placements to volume campaigns. Established in 1987, there are 13 sites across the country with over 500 recruitment consultants across 21 specialist divisions.
Search currently delivers a large number of applications to their users - both business specific and general office applications. The business specific applications include recruitment, web, finance and payroll. The general office applications include email, windows etc. The recruitment solution has over 600 users, finance has 45 and payroll and invoicing has 20 users.
Business Challenge
Search had concerns surrounding their long term strategic vision, development and compatibility of their existing line of business applications. They also had concerns about the affect this was having on service levels and staff efficiency. Specific issues that they were facing included:
- Instability of existing systems and infrastructure
- User perception of the systems were low
- Running Microsoft Outlook Express for email with a lack of standard corporate functionality
- A mixed desktop environment causing support issues
The current infrastructure and its systems proved to be over - complicated and would have restricted any plans for expansion
Search Consultancy need to ensure they deliver a recruitment service that consistently meets customer needs and creates an effective working environment through efficient internal IT systems. In order to achieve this they set out the following objectives for Northgate:
- Upgrade the infrastructure to support new business systems resulting in improved organisational efficiencies, stability and customer service.
- Reduce support requirements and provide a scalable technology and infrastructure platform which will reduce costs
The Solution
Northgate delivered its Store, Manage, Protect & Connect range to Search Consultancy. The specific services delivered included Backup Strategy from Store, Hardware Break/Fix from Manage, BCP/DR from Protect, Email Migration, LAN/WAN Provision and Virtual Desktop from Northgate's Connect range.
Northgate implemented a new infrastructure platform that was capable of supporting a number of new business critical systems for recruitment, payroll and finance. The new platform delivered improved efficiencies as it was a much more resilient, stable and scalable platform.
A new LAN/WAN provision under Northgate's Connect theme was implemented to provide improved speed of server communications. The link between the 2 key sites was also upgraded to support the new replication disaster recovery services. This resulted in a more reliable and efficient system for both customers and staff, thus improving productivity and customer service levels. It delivers secure and reliable access to applications and efficient access to network resources for all users.
Northgate also implemented a single high performance central file store to host all user data through the virtual desktop. Northgate's Storage solution provides the highest level of application availability and protection and is scalable and flexible to deal with changing business needs. Provides greater accessibility to its resources and makes better use of them, it operates more intelligently and efficiently. Staff spend less time fire-fighting storage problems and more time focusing on achieving strategic aims. Storage is pooled making it easier to provision, manage, backup and grow. Service standards rise as you can now respond dynamically to the changing needs of your business.
The new front-end recruitment application uses the Microsoft exchange messaging system. Northgate migrated Search users from an ageing email service more akin to personal 'home' use, lacking the features found in the exchange messaging solution i.e. shared calendars, high levels of security, automated message handling, central storage of messaging data to a new Exchange and Outlook 2003.
A lack of provision for a backup strategy can result in loss of data, rising costs and downtime to business operations. Northgate implemented a data replication and fail over service for all critical applications and services within Search. The service delivered included a centralised backup solution which involved the implementation of a high speed backup environment using new disk-to-disk technologies. This improved business continuity and efficiencies. It also provided lower costs in terms of management of data and security in their ability to provide continued services to customers if they experienced downtime or loss of data.
Key Results
Northgate implemented an improved infrastructure platform that supports the new business critical systems, is more resilient, stable and scalable. Secure and reliable access to applications has been provided through Northgate's LAN/WAN solution, delivering improved customer service levels.
The new messaging system delivers a more reliable, secure and efficient service to users providing staff with improved systems to deliver improved services to customers. The new messaging system delivers a more efficient method of sharing resources, reduces administrative costs, promotes a unified corporate identity, only requires a single infrastructure to support it and has full expansion capabilities.
The data replication and fail over service implemented improves business continuity and reduces costs in terms of data management and security. It also provides the business with confidence in delivering a high level of service to customers, even when something goes wrong.
The solution has the flexibility to grow in line with Search's business requirements and helps to meet short and long term ICT strategies to deliver a scalable solution, reduced costs, greater efficiencies and improved customers service. Search Consultancy also have access to a greater pool of skills and resources as a Northgate partner.
Key Benefits
- Improved customer service
- Reduced support and admin costs
- Improved efficiencies
- Improved system stability
Mandy Bell, Business Solutions Director, Search Consultancy
"Search engaged with Northgate on an initial software purchase and through these early discussions Northgate were proactive at understanding our business and the issues we had with our infrastructure. Northgate worked closely with us to develop a new technical infrastructure which improved our system availability and manageability; they also led the technical discussions with our new business application providers. Northgate's team provided great insight to the technical improvements and also provided guidance on the whole business transformation. Search's investment in its infrastructure and business systems, together with the insight provided by Northgate, has further established our position as one of the UK's leading recruitment agencies"
