Benjamin West. Case study

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Anna Fields
8 years ago
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1 Benjamin West Case study

2 How Managed Networks helps Benjamin West to grow When your team is growing rapidly, you need someone who can handle IT support so you don't have to. Here's how Managed Networks supports Benjamin West, a global purchasing agent for the hotel business, whose UK presence is growing rapidly. The background: a growing UK office In recent months, the UK office of Benjamin West has seen remarkable growth. The office doubled in size from January to August 2014, and now employs 23 people in the heart of London, near Silicon Roundabout. The company - which helps equip four- star and five- star hotels with FF&E (furniture, fittings and equipment) and OS&E (operating supplies and equipment) - acts as a trusted buying agent for its hospitality clients, aiming to provide complex services with accuracy, integrity and reliability. For UK operations manager Kerri Lewis, efficient and reliable IT systems are critical if she's to get the job done while managing that rapid growth.

3 What the company needed: a local IT company to rely on When Benjamin West were looking for a new IT support company, they had two main criteria: proximity and reliability. Having an IT support company that was close enough to the office was critical to Benjamin West, so that potential problems could be handled quickly and easily. The previous supplier was based outside London, but this time Benjamin West put the contract out to tender to four local businesses. Reliability was important because as an operations manager for a global company, Kerri is busy enough without the complex demands of IT. She needed a reliable firm who could handle tasks from server support to software licences - and let her get on with her job. "There's so many things you need to do from an IT perspective that I don't want to think about," Kerri says. "We need to have our systems up and running in order to be able to work." The proactive solution: Rotation Days from Managed Networks A key factor that set Managed Networks ahead of the local competition, says Kerri, was its system of Rotation Days. Under this system, a qualified support engineer from Managed Networks spends the day at Benjamin West every other month, tackling IT issues on a proactive basis. "If I throw something at him, he will get it done," says Kerri. "If there's something niggly that one of the team members wants fixing, he will go over and sort it then and there." A Managed Networks engineer also set up what Kerri calls a "wonderful" manual so that staff know how to set up a new user on their network. This is a recurring job in an expanding team.

4 Managed Networks supplies helpdesk support to Benjamin West too, and the fact that Managed Networks is just a few minutes' walk from their London office comes in useful here. "Sometimes if the server goes down, I'm on the phone, and they walk down the road and they fix it." With Benjamin West expanding rapidly, Managed Networks has also been there to help source IT equipment. "Laptops, computers, screens, all of those things, they buy and invoice us for," Kerri says. The benefit: IT outsourcing you can trust Overall, Kerri sees one key benefit of using Managed Networks: the ability to outsource IT and know that jobs are being ticked off the list. "The way I look at it is that the Managed Networks engineer is like having our own IT department," she explains. "He's the one who knows how to do things, so I don't have to think about them. I know he has got it covered." She'll also be relying on Managed Networks in the near future. "We're moving offices soon, fingers crossed, and Managed Networks will do the transfer for us. "They do things that I don't have to think about or wouldn't know about. That's the way I like it." Managed Networks Limited 6-8 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4BX

5 Meta description: How Managed Networks provides reliable IT support for Benjamin West, a purchasing agent for the hotel business.

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