Today’s IT environment is a vast and complex arena where businesses demand higher levels of expertise. Our x360 IT Framework has been designed with these IT strategic businesses in mind!
IT is no longer a primary discipline requirement where a company’s main focus is hardware support. The fact is that hardware is now more reliable than it has ever been and, when coupled with the many options available to businesses through Cloud Services and Cloud Infrastructure, the nature of today’s company’s support needs has changed immeasurably from before.
The focus for IT today is more about management of the virtual environment, the operating systems, the applications and down to the user desktop and mobile devices. This all falls under the heading of ‘Managed Services’, a term used very loosely by many IT companies today.
Managed Services is not just about sending an electronic report to a customer on a monthly basis with useless statistical information. It’s about proactively monitoring a customer’s IT infrastructure and reacting to solve problems before they impact the environment or user. It’s about taking preventative measures within the customer’s IT infrastructure to prevent issues occurring in the first place, minimising user disruption and improving business efficiency. It’s about getting to the root of all IT problems and solving them in a manner which ensures they will not occur again.
This approach to Managed Services can only be performed by a company not just with a team that has exceptional expertise and qualifications, but has at its core a disposition to deliver the highest levels of service to customers.
At ERS IT Solutions, we are proud to be such a company; a company that has brought together a unique team of specialists that enables us to deliver end-to-end IT solutions and services to our customers. The bedrock of our Managed Services is based around our x360 IT Framework which is comprised of four complimentary tenants that enable us to deliver solutions and services far beyond what many of our competitors can manage. Below we explain our approach to delivering services based around our x360 IT Framework.
Through many years of experience within the IT industry, we have identified that the best-managed IT environments are those where the customers with whom we engage are IT strategic. These customers understand the value that IT solutions bring to their business and are willing to invest the time and effort with us to develop an IT strategic plan.
Once the on-boarding process is completed, we then start to explore the areas where we have recommended remedial action and present the customer with a project plan that includes a quantifiable return on investment.
In many cases, the first project on the radar will be a migration plan where we perform a partial or complete move of the customer’s infrastructure to a suitable cloud platform. Both Cloud infrastructure and Cloud Solutions can bring huge benefits and significant savings to any business. The primary benefit to the customer is a reduction in hardware purchases where the company moves from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure model. This allows businesses to budget in a more structured way and has the advantage of allowing them to scale up or down in line with their business needs. Software upgrades also become more manageable, allowing the business to keep pace with technology in a much more strategic fashion. At ERS, our infrastructure architects start with the design of a complete migration plan for our customers which is agreed and executed, ensuring minimal impact and disruption to the client’s business.
Why not contact us now and talk to one of our Infrastructure Engineers!
Infrastructure is only one element of a customer’s overall IT Solutions requirements. Many new customers with whom we engage may have already invested in a Cloud Services Plan without knowing the full extent and capabilities of what they have purchased. In many cases, this is because their previous IT provider just did not have the skills or expertise to deploy these solutions or explain the value they could bring to the business.
At ERS, we have a team of application specialists that have extensive experience across the full suite of applications available within the Microsoft Office 365 platform. This enables us to punch well above our weight and bring incredible value to our customers. One of the most powerful applications available as part of Microsoft Office 365 is SharePoint, a document management and collaboration platform that can bring enormous benefits to every business today. SharePoint allows a business to move away from the archaic file folder structures of the past and into a powerful document management environment where users can create, share and store documentation and assets that are available to them anytime, anywhere, on any device.
However, adopting any new application should not be taken lightly and to assist our customers we have developed a structured implementation plan to facilitate their initial move to the SharePoint platform. The key objective of this plan is to minimise the change that users experience and allow them to continue to work in a manner with which they are already familiar while still benefiting from the new features available within the SharePoint platform. We have found that this approach encourages speedier user adoption and the business begins to see productivity benefits earlier than expected. By keeping the deployment changes simple and using standard out-of-the-box functionality, users begin to see the benefits of the platform quickly and, before long, requests and suggestions for how the platform could be used to improve other business processes come thick and fast.
Why not contact us now and talk to one of our Application Specialists!
More and more businesses are beginning to understand how custom software development can benefit their overall business, improving both internal and external processes and driving value and sales revenues higher. Software is not a ‘one size fits all’ and in many cases a custom application can quite often be far more productive and provide a better fit within the business environment.
At ERS, we have been successfully developing custom software applications for more than 15 years across desktop, portal and mobile device platforms, and we have built an impeccable reputation for delivering robust solutions on time and within budget. Building software applications that work is more than just writing code. It’s about vision and the ability to get inside the customer’s mind to understand and visualise what it is they are trying to achieve. It’s about bringing years of development experience to the table, demonstrating that we not only understand their brief but that they can depend on us to identify the gaps in the scope that would prevent them from achieving a successful project.
Before a single line of code is written by our team, we engage with the customer in a discovery process. This usually involves multiple meetings between the project lead and business stakeholders to identify the complete scope of the project. Throughout this process, we generate a series of visual screen representations of the solution that explains how the various stakeholders will interact with the final solution. While this involves a great deal of effort, it is vital in helping the stakeholders to identify what they may have missed and allows us to update the visuals to include the required functionality. Once the visuals have been completed and signed off, they form the basis for the project scope and on which the scope or work document will be based. We have seen from experience that this exercise has saved many of our customers hundreds of thousands of euro in potential change requests by helping to identify functionality that was originally omitted but critical to the success of the project.
Why not contact us now and talk to one of our Software Design Consultants!
Underpinning all of the solutions that we deliver here at ERS is our Managed Services and Helpdesk team. Excellent customer service is in our DNA and our sole objective is to solve problems for our customers in an efficient and professional manner. Our team will have already deployed software agents across all devices to monitor and manage critical events that keep these devices secure and protected.
There are many aspects of the customer’s environment that are monitored by our team, including service threshold levels that check unusual activity across memory, disk storage, CPU usage and temperature, to name a few. This enables our team to react quickly to identify the root cause of the problem and take corrective action even before the customer has even realised that an issue has occurred. This all contributes towards higher business productivity by reducing business disruption for the customer.
At ERS, there is only one type of customer service in which we believe in and that is to resolve customer problems within the minimal amount of time. Our services are delivered to our customers based on an agreed ‘Service Level Agreement (SLA)’ where we guarantee that we will have the problem resolved within a specific window of time without exception. If your experience of service from your current IT provider is having to wait for hours or even days to get a call back and a possible resolution… that is not customer service. Our helpdesk team can proudly state that they will resolve 99% of customer problems within 15 minutes of taking a call and that claim can be validated by speaking with any of our customers. When customer support is required our helpdesk team springs into action by initiating a remote session with the user. Our managed agent software enables the team to set up a secure remote session with the client, which enables the customer to show us the problem visually and then allows the technician to take control and perform the necessary remedial work.
Every customer service request or call is logged in our custom case management system, which is used to monitor trends and record actions taken within the customer’s environment. This allows us to identify any areas within the IT infrastructure that might need attention and can form the basis of our quarterly reviews with the customer. Our case management system also acts as a knowledge base, providing the helpdesk technicians with information on common approaches to problem resolution, which also contributes towards our support efficiency levels.
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