Construction industry
SCOPE OF WORKS
The client has over 500 IT users across multiple offices globally, providing highly technical design engineering consultancy services to a wide range of global clients. Highly recognised within the civil engineering with notable international projects in Europe, Asia and the Middle East the client contracted Coubari to modernise its IT service department.
ROLE
As the sole contractor, Coubari carried out the initial transformation and deployment of fully managed IT services.
KEY CHALLENGES
Upon winning the contract to provide fully managed IT services, Coubari’s key challenge was to integrate the client’s disparate IT services; different offices had different systems, there was no uniformity across the business, regular simultaneous major faults occurred at multiple locations. The business was quickly expanding so Coubari had to respond innovatively, efficiently and at speed.
KEY WINS
Coubari introduced uniformity, resilience, helpdesk service tools, monitoring tools; created and delivered a fit-for-purpose IT strategy across all locations and provided reliable and secure remote access.
We created a new global WAN and service blueprint covering offices across UK, Middle East and Asia; worked closely with IBM Europe, Lenovo UK and WatchGuard engineers; managed IBM Europe engineers on-site in the collaboration and implementation of the client’s system-resilience, replication speeds and network performance requirements to support, for example, high resource engineering and CAD applications.
The client identified remote access as critical to business success, and we introduced multi-factor authentication via mobile applications, migration of data service to Microsoft 365, meeting room collaborations, one-touch video conferencing. This significantly reduced travelling costs between UK and global offices, dramatically increased collaboration to the great benefit of the client’s business, and improved the client’s green credentials. The client was ideally positioned for the demands the Covid pandemic placed on remote working that proved challenging for businesses elsewhere who lost time in rapidly rolling-out these systems in a game of catch-up; business was uninterrupted, and move to home-working seamless.
INNOVATION
The client had engineers in various locations within the UK and in different time zones across the world. File sizes were extremely large, posing a significant challenge to collaboration on simulations; large file size and loading times made it difficult for simultaneous detailed work on time-critical and highly technical projects. Sharing CAD files could take hours, and the time zone difference could make a difference in days. We developed a system where file loading times were reduced from minutes to seconds, enabling increased knowledge- sharing and heightened collaboration within existing staff.
Our infrastructure upgrade included fewer servers (over 50% reduction) and global WAN links, delivered faster backup and recovery times, introduced business continuity for all offices and provided a system that was scalable and cost-effective.