We recently interviewed our client Jeremy Cave, Director of Technology for Dions.

Here’s what Jeremy had to say about his company’s Challenge, the CTC Solution, and the Results: 

Challenge:

We needed a new solution. We had aging physical infrastructure and were faced with a myriad of downsides to replacing them.

1) The associated capital expenditures.

2) The difficulties with volume licensing.

3) The time and money, as well as the challenges of managing, securing, and ensuring safe backups of on-premise servers.

I knew what the organization needed. However, technology these days is so complex.  The idea that there is one guy in the basement of every company that knows everything is not the reality anymore. There is no way one small team can do it all. I knew where we needed to go, but the path was unclear.

Solution:

Roll out Microsoft 365 and bring in a partner that knew how to do it right. At the time, we didn’t know the value CTC Productivity would deliver at every step along the way. CTC Productivity guided and assisted us to achieve our vision. From initial set up and planning to the migration of the data, helping us to streamline workflows, change behaviors, and assist with the full adoption of this new way of working.

From an infrastructure standpoint, CTC provided and continues to provide the safety net, safety map, and directions. It’s not a maze but it is complex. I didn’t want to risk unintended consequences. CTC has provided us with a traveling partner and the security of knowing that someone can help us with the challenges (and celebrate with us at the end!).

One of the key decisions we made during the project was to create a better process for managing our KPIs. So, in addition to helping us migrate to the new and improved platform, we prioritized creating a dashboard even before we migrated. The dashboard will handle our top 5 KPIs. There was a huge fear that this house of cards that we had built from multi-nested Excel spreadsheets would break during the migration.  This alone is one of the best decisions we made. The CTC team members building out our dashboard are fantastic.

One piece of advice I would offer other companies is that Power BI a fantastic tool, but it is complex. When professionals that know the settings and how they can be tweaked do the work you can create something on a completely different level of performance. There is a huge difference when it is done perfectly by a professional. It helps make a company vision a reality.

Generally, on IT projects we expect consultants are going to speak over the heads of the end users (and IT staff!). That is one of the key differentiators with CTC. They are brilliant people and understand business and speak at the level of the audience. Going at your pace to ensure you are comfortable, but then speeding up as you adapt.

Once the foundation is in place, we will dive deeper into the Optimization phase of the project. Looking at our processes and how to streamline those workflows. This will be a huge benefit.  Just initial discussions with the CTC business process improvement folks have opened our eyes to what is possible. They are insightful, detail oriented and do excellent analysis on complex workflows.

To be an outsider and be able to quickly understand complex workflow is a powerful skill set. It’s like describing the Mona Lisa to someone. So complex and difficult to even explain. Their ability to understand complex workflow and put it together in 3D in their minds is amazing.

Also, we didn’t directly ask Jan to coach us along the way, but that was another awesome benefit. We didn’t expect it and honestly, I didn’t necessarily realize it was happening along the way until later. Working with her to help manage the whole process was a huge perk. Her experience in coaching and helping people through personal development and professional change is relevant in this space. Each of us needs help at a different level and I felt reassured by our check-ins. When I was unclear, Jan’s coaching and guidance were very valuable.

Results:

The estimated long-term benefits to the company with just the technology migration and changing to the new architecture is that we anticipate spending 5-10% less over the course of a 5-year period. Beyond 5 years we will realize even more savings. Plus, it eliminates the risk of exposure from a catastrophic event.

But most of the gains are in the improvements in soft costs. Improving the way we collaborate has no price tag. O365 is a solution that will eliminate risk and provide improvements across the board as well as efficiency and how quickly we can share information and make faster decisions. Just getting to the place where we have only one version of a document will have financial benefits by eliminating rework and confusion.

One of the improvements that surprised me the most about this new technology is that the importance of knowing where something is saved goes away. You can get to it in so many ways you don’t need to remember the directory structure to find something. Eliminating this time waster will have a huge impact on everyone’s productivity.

Here is one piece of advice I would give to other businesses. Do it.  Move to 365. The benefit of the cloud is where the future is. You will be glad you did. Also partner with experts that know what they are doing. It doesn’t matter how good your IT group is. They could be spending their time and energy in other areas furthering your business and letting experts that understand Microsoft 365 do what they do best.

My experience with CTC Productivity has been fantastic and I would absolutely recommend them.