King and Moffatt Group is a private limited company with its head office located on the Boyle Road in Carrick on Shannon, Co. Roscommon. The company was established in 1982 by two electricians, John Moffatt and Pat King, as they decided to make the move from domestic wiring into industrial. The company is still going strong today and puts this down to a focus on professionalism, project management and customer service. Testament to their success is the fact that they are still working with many customers they took on 10 or 15 years ago.

Ciaran King, Pat’s son, is responsible for business development in the company and was the driving force behind their move to Microsoft Office 365. As is the case with many companies, their server was nearing retirement and they were deciding whether to purchase a new one or look at alternatives. Ciaran attended a talk about Cloud technology in Galway as he wanted to find more and there he met Sean from CloudAssist, a Microsoft Partner, and another business that had recently made the move to the Cloud with the help of CloudAssist. Impressed by what he heard, he asked Sean to present Microsoft Office 365 “SureStep” process to key personnel within King and Moffat. A full report was presented by CloudAssist including an IT security assessment and a full audit which outlined what they had and what they would need, including a full bill of costs. Satisfied with CloudAssist’s credentials and their very clear planning model they decided to go ahead with Office 365.

The Solution
CloudAssist.ie worked closely with Ciaran to ensure all steps were in place before the move to Office 365. The whole move took place over the weekend with Sean at the other end of the phone to answer any questions “they supported me the whole weekend through the migration – it is an excellent service and I’d highly recommend them to anyone else.” As the company was already familiar with Office and Outlook it was an easy transition for staff. Additionally there were tools to make the transition even smoother including the ability to run different versions of Office side by side allowing staff time to get used to the new version. Although Ciaran was familiar with Office 365 he wasn’t really aware of all the tools that came with it. They have started to use more and more of these tools including document storage and sharing, workflows, video conferencing and screen sharing.

“Office 365 is used now across all functions of the business – admin, finance, project management, the store, engineers and so on; order forms can be checked out by a foreman or contracts manager and then checked back in when updated by the foreman and the store receives a notification using the workflow feature in SharePoint; store staff can link up with contracts managers, directors and foremen using Lync to collaborate on documents and conduct virtual meetings with the personnel based in the UK; engineers and quantity surveyors use job folders in SharePoint to track all of the information relating to a job. Previously this information would have been emailed and forth. Now the current and live version is always available and accessible from the one place and Lync is used for screen sharing of CAD designs and different meetings can be held through Lync to share and update these designs on the go.” For teams working remotely on specific projects, a team site can be set up for the duration of the project which contains all the information relating to that project, in one place.

At the same time as they migrated over to Office 365, they also moved from XP to Windows 8 to standardise operating systems. As XP won’t be supported after April 2014, it made sense to make the change. Security in Windows 8 is far superior than XP and Bitlocker which is a security feature with Windows 8 means that hard drives are encrypted and this is important for ISO 9000 as it helps keep data secure which was an additional feature.

The Benefits

Collaboration/Teamwork:
Previously employees only had in-house email or had to dial into the VPN which was slow. With SharePoint and SkyDrive Pro, which are both document storage and sharing features in Office 365, they are now able to give access to suppliers and contractors. They are also able to co-author documents which means that two people can update and edit the same document simultaneously. This is particularly beneficial for the project managers. All of this results in a more efficient team because self-service is now possible and encouraged.

Improved Customer Service:
Collaboration between Ireland and the UK is much easier and more efficient so they’re better able to share information. They have a new folder structure and new procedures in place and SharePoint makes it easier to track and monitor jobs all the way from tender to after-client service. All of the information is live and up to date so time isn’t wasted trying to find the latest version of a document – this speeds up their response time for customers. They are also able to respond to tenders much more quickly and get quotes out to customers as they are able to search for similar or previous tenders and update them, rather than creating from scratch which they would have done previously.

Easier IT Management:
Office 365 allows you to add or remove users very easily. Due to the number of contractors used in the business, this has really saved time. They also have large employee attrition but with Office 365 they can now hold dormant users and when people leave, they can use eDiscovery to look at those emails. They previously had to manage a large email archive, but as more documents are stored and shared centrally, this reduces file storage and the size of their email archive.

New Business Development:
As King & Moffatt continue to expand, all of these efficiencies enable them to do more with less and in the current climate this has enabled them to continue to focus on providing quality service to long-term customers, but also to go after new business “We are still working with some of the same clients we took on 10 or 15 years ago. With Office 365, we can continue to provide a quality customer service while growing the business by taking on new customers. We wouldn’t have been able to do that 6 months ago”, Ciaran King.

The company also sees that their move to Office 365 will support them in achieving ISO accreditation. The audit that CloudAssist carried out enabled them to address issues for ISO and the ongoing process improvements will all help them achieve this standard. “If we can improve our whole process, and achieve ISO9000 this will help our image with customers. If we have all our processes in place, everyone is getting a quality service”.

Office 365 also enables them to present a professional image to customers in Ireland and beyond and enables them to compete with larger companies for business “As we look to the UK for more business, Office 365 enables us to offer a very professional and efficient service by enabling us to work with staff in the UK as easily as if they were in the office. The fact that we can have a .co.uk address for our UK projects and provide even temporary contract staff with a proper King & Moffatt email address is really important as it enables us to present a very professional image”

Reduced Costs:
Although it’s hard to put a number on it and it’s still early days, Ciaran believes that they have already reduced costs and will continue to do so “the cost of replacing a new server, maintenance, call out charges we would have had before will all be reduced. Also the costs associated with employee time and duplication of jobs will be a huge factor over the long-term”.

Ciaran puts much of the success of their move to Office 365 down to their partner, Sean Brady and CloudAssist.ie; “Everything that we had to do was given to us in a step by step document, detailed out. Everything was very easy to follow and anyone that had questions had Sean to talk to. Overall it was a great service provided and we’re delighted we made the move”

CloudAssist profile
CloudAssist is a certified Microsoft Cloud partner and is an Office 365 migrator for Exchange and SharePoint with a user-centric approach. We assist our clients to adopt the social features of Office 365 so that their users are more collaborative and connected both internally in the organisation and with external users such as suppliers, partners and, most importantly, their customers. Our aim is to help our clients to get the most of their investment in Office 365 by understanding the business needs and their own cloud readiness.

CloudAssist is the proud sponsor of JustSocial which is a non-profit organisation helping charities in Ireland to adopt the Office 365 donation from Microsoft to be more socially connected to their community of interest.

CloudAssist Contact details:
Sean Brady

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Mobile: (087) 2021333