Measurement Solutions

Due to rapid growth, Measurement Solutions, the leading provider of high-quality metrology systems and services,  needed to outsource its IT  to free up internal skills and resources and focus on core business activity.

“I used to take care of our IT,” explains Managing Director, Iain Caville. “But, as the company grew, it became clear that my time would be better spent running the business rather than trying to be our IT Department. So, because we weren’t big enough to justify employing a dedicated IT manager, we made the decision to bring in a third party to handle our IT function.

“We’d been working with Xperience for some time – they’d installed our first server back in 2011 and were already supporting our existing Act CRM solution – so it made sense to use them, especially as we had such a good relationship and were pleased with the service. They were also locally based, which was important for us.”

An IT company that speaks our language

“Our business has grown enormously over the last 18 years. Back at the start we had just 3 or 4 staff using locally networked desktop PCs. Then, in 2011 we moved to new offices and got Xperience to install our first server. Around 18 months ago, they redeployed this as a back-up to a new Exchange server. Today we have 13 people working across two offices – and the entire IT infrastructure is fully-managed and maintained by Xperience, who also acts as our Managed IT Services Provider.”

“As we’ve grown, we’ve found ourselves using Xperience more and more, including web protection and monitoring, anti-spam and anti-virus protection plus remote monitoring and support.”

“More recently, Xperience has set up a new cloud-based email service for us,” says Iain. “They’ve also been working with us to customise Act so it’s a better fit for us. Basically, whenever we see a need, we bring in Xperience to help. As technology gets ever more complex, I know I can depend on them to explain everything clearly and in a language my staff understand.”

“They also pass on news of developments that may be of benefit. For instance they’ll call me and say: ‘This is something you should be looking at’ or ‘We believe this is the way you should be going’. None of this would have happened if we hadn’t made the decision to outsource our IT to a third party.”

Significant time savings

“The main benefit of outsourcing our IT function to Xperience has been in terms of time savings,” Iain continues. “For example, if one of our guys has a problem with the software or network connection, in the past he would have had to wait for me to become available to deal with it. Now if we have a problem he can simply pick up the phone, talk to Xperience and they get one of their people onto it straight away.”

“Moreover, their services freed me to get on with the running of the business. I used to be tied up with time-consuming IT tasks. Now, I simply ring the guys at Xperience and say: ‘I need this doing, can you do it?’ And I know I can just forget about it, it’s no longer my problem.”

“We can also communicate seamlessly between sites and home-workers, making us more efficient than we’ve ever been. We’ve also made improvements in the way we transfer data to and from customers. In the past, we would have used some of the free FTP resources that are out there. Now, thanks to Xperience, we have our own dedicated FTP server which allows us to portray a much more professional image to our customer base.”

“Act CRM has always been a major part of our day-to-day activities, but in recent years we’ve seen significant changes on that front too. We’re making much better and more efficient use of it, especially since we upgraded Act. Tasks that used to require two or three spreadsheets are now done through Act, and because everything is synchronised centrally, staff productivity has increased immensely.”