The highly successful Irish business, BCM (Business Cost Management), believe that their implementation of Microsoft Office 365 has enabled further growth, expansion and is reducing their I.T costs by up to 60%.

“The implementation of Microsoft Office 365 has allowed me to focus on the business. It puts our franchisees across the world on the same platform and enables standardisation and consistency which is essential for our company‘s success. We estimate I.T cost savings will be up to 60% as a result.” John Mac Namara, Founder & CEO, BCM Business Cost Management.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm-Xe89sykc  

Highlights                                                                                       

•Reduced company I.T. spend by 60%              

•More productive use of I.T. resources                                                             

•Huge time-savings achieved enabling staff to focus less on admin tasks and more time on customers and prospects
•Enabled consistency and standardisation across the 30 BCM offices worldwide

Established twenty years ago in 1993, BCM are cost reduction and management specialists offering their now renowned ‘No Savings… No Charge' policy to customers all over the world. Since commencing the franchising of their business in 1997, they have developed a significant international presence with 30 offices spread across 16 countries. The company has 8 staff based in Limerick and a total of 90 employees worldwide. Their clients cover a wide range of sectors including manufacturing, professional, service organisations as well as state and semi-state bodies.

Situation
Prior to their implementation of Microsoft Office 365 earlier this year, BCM was experiencing high I.T costs as well as significant difficulties with establishing consistency across their various franchises worldwide. The company had an in-house data server while their email system and website were hosted externally. John Mac Namara, BCM CEO, states that the company’s I.T was: ‘A bit all over the place really. We wanted to clean that up’. The company was using a number of different I.T systems none of which worked well together and John and his team were finding that too much of their time was spent on tedious I.T tasks instead of with customers or generating new business.

Solution
When researching a solution to their I.T challenges, BCM was approached by Microsoft Partner, Cloud Assist a specialist Microsoft Cloud Partner, who presented cloud solution, Microsoft Office 365, as a possible answer to the company’s problems. Sean Brady from Cloud Assist championed the various benefits cloud computing could offer the company; primarily that it could save them time and money, offer better data security as well as providing a unifying platform for BCM’S I.T across their different offices worldwide. Following an initial trial migration to Microsoft Office 365, BCM concluded that this solution was the right one for them. John McNamara of BCM freely admits that he initially had concerns about this implementation, ‘The main thing keeping me awake at night was that we had 16 countries that had to be moved over to Microsoft Office 365 and I was worried their emails would all disappear. 30 offices not functioning would have been a disaster. As it turned out my fears were completely unwarranted.’ The entire process took just one weekend which meant that there was no disruption to service for the customers or staff of BCM. John credits Sean Brady from Cloud Assist as having done ‘A very thorough job. He knew there was no room for error'. Cloud Assist also invested time into ensuring all BCM staff were fully trained and up-to-speed with Office 365 before the migration began.

‘Having the right partner on board was key; Sean Brady (Cloud Assist)’s input has been huge, he took the time to really understand our business and to educate us about Office 365, which resulted in the right solution for us and a seamless implementation process,’ John MacNamara, Founder & CEO, BCM.

Thus by Monday morning when BCM’S migration to Office 365 was complete, all staff across the 30 offices were up and running with the new system immediately.

Success
Since their migration to Microsoft Office 365, BCM estimates that they have reduced their I.T costs by at least 60%. In addition John Mac Namara believes that the benefits have been even more extensive than financial savings, ‘It allows me to focus on the business day to day, not the background noise… It puts our franchisees across the world on the same platform.’

The anywhere access to Microsoft Office 365 (from any device) has allowed BCM staff greater flexibility in terms of work location and data sharing across different devices – enabling BCM employees across the world to access the same Microsoft Office documents on all pcs and laptops. The company has also been able to optimise its previous investment in SharePoint – utilising it to its full capacity as a way for BCM to share the most up-to-date important training resources with all employees.

BCM continue to strive towards continued expansion. Their goal is to automate as many of their processes as possible, allowing them more time to be spent finding creative ways to save money for their clients and create a competitive advantage for the company. BCM’s positive experience with Microsoft Office 365, as well as their utilisation of other Microsoft tools such as Skype - for online meetings has encouraged them to adopt further Microsoft solutions including Windows 8 and Microsoft Lync.