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"The transformation of William Alexander"
Head of Consulting
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William Alexander is a company with two divisions: an IT recruitment business and a consultancy arm. The latter has a track record of providing support to major projects for FTSE 100 clients and public sector organisations like HMRC.
It was the consultancy side of the business, faced the problem of keeping their processes functioning smoothly as they rapidly scaled.
Davies explained, “We were expanding rapidly, recruiting staff quickly and we found that we needed to improve our workflow. We were struggling with finances and billing and how we could best serve our clients.”
The company examined the possibility of moving to Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics but quickly realised that these were not going to be the way forward. His experience in dealing with major projects came in handy here. “I’m an IT professional myself, so I know how they work. These big systems are designed to work in large corporates and very configurable to address the unique needs of those types of organisations.”
William Alexander was a much smaller operation with just 40 users and need its IT strategy to reflect that. Also, they needed to consider the 150 associates who were working on client sites and whose contracts and billing needed to be managed accurately and efficiently.
The company was recommended to engage Information EXP, a SharePoint consultancy, as the best option for implementing process automation. What attracted Davies to Information EXP was that it was a firm that had a real appreciation of what a smaller company needed. “They didn’t talk about all the shiny extras but were focused very much on what we could achieve at reasonable costs,” he said.
The implementation went smoothly, so much so that William Alexander was wary of proceeding too quickly, although the temptation was great. “It was us who were throttling back,” said Davies.
There were some pain points along the way, but Davies acknowledged that these were down to the way that William Alexander had initially been set up. “We should all have thought of migration of data, there was a bit of work for us on cleansing the data, it was a natural pain point,” he explained.
The new solution has completely changed the efficiency of the company processes, decisively speeding up operations. “The Information EXP team have built a Power App to use with our 100+ associates who need to report on their delivery. The clients require our project managers to make consolidated reports based on the agreed monthly deliverables. They make the reports by mobile Power App, which is integrated into SharePoint, so we have a single source of the truth.
“Previous, this was a long process: month end reports could take for ever. With the new system, we can now do them in hours, not days.”
It’s not only monthly reporting that has improved. “In the past,” said Davies, “when a new deal was completed, we needed to get all the paperwork done. This was a process that could take four to five hours. With the Information EXP solution, this process now takes 30 minutes, and the level of accuracy has improved too”.
The new system has worked so well that the company is now taking everything a step further. Davies said that Information EXP is now building a system for the recruitment side of the business. “It will be very similar to the Consultancy division, although the workflow will be slightly different – we’ll be looking forward to similar productivity gains on that said of the business.”
“We certainly made the right choice to move our business forward,” said Davies. “From a commercial perspective – all project costs were fixed in advanced, and the operational costs were clearly laid out with no additional Microsoft Licensing required.”
The division has now started with the Information EXP’s Policy Express solution.
