https://www.xperience-group.com/case-study/rutland-lighting/
| Client(s): |
|
|---|---|
| Key Contact(s): | Andrew Bonnett |
| Industries | |
| Solutions |
"The most important benefit for us was to be able to improve the sharing of information. We use a lot of Excel spreadsheets. With Office 365 there is a single master document that is always bang up-to-date and which only one person can work on at any one time. So there’s never any risk of having multiple copies or worrying that someone else might have a more up-to-date version.”
Located near Oakham, Rutland Lighting is a manufacturer and importer of decorative domestic lighting, with major customers including Dunelm and Laura Ashley. The company upgraded to the cloud-based Office 365 , helping staff to be more flexible and efficient in how and where they work.
Andrew Bonnett, a Partner in Rutland Lighting. “We’ve been using the various versions of Microsoft Office, but we realised that more and more businesses were turning to Office 365 rather than installing yet another version of the old CD-based software. Also, the amount of information held on our exchange server was slowing our own server down. We wanted to free up its capacity and improve server performance by transferring information to the cloud.”
“But most important of all, we wanted to be able to share information better, both internally and externally, for example between everyone in the office and an external member of staff who works from home. In addition, I travel to China twice a year to visit the factories that make our products. Although I could access files and work relatively well using the old methods, I understood that Office 365 would make the process much simpler, allowing me to always access an up-to–date version of my business files.”
“We had been working with Xperience for quite a while; they installed our server. So when we decided to upgrade to Office 365, it made sense to ask them for assistance. Xperience moved our server information onto the cloud-based Office 365 and came in for a day to install the software on our various machines.”
“One year on Office 365 has definitely given us greater flexibility and that’s becoming more evident the more we use it.”
“As I said, the most important benefit for us was to be able to improve the sharing of information. We use a lot of Excel spreadsheets. With Office 365 there is a single master document that is always bang up-to-date and which only one person can work on at any one time. So there’s never any risk of having multiple copies or worrying that someone else might have a more up-to-date version.”
“Everything is so much more accessible, too. For example our designer works from home and she can access documents off-site in exactly the same way as we do here. And of course when I’m in China, I can log onto Office 365 via Wi-Fi in hotels and so on. So the same up-to-date files are as accessible in China as they would be here in the UK. It’s just like being at my office desk – – yet I’m thousands of miles away.”
“Our Office software is always up-to-date rather than having to update it manually every time a new version is released. With Office 365 there is also much more flexibility; you can add or remove users as and when you need them and you can add it on to more machines. The number of devices you can have it on is greater than it was on a bought disc copy of Office! And of course a more streamlined way of operating saves us all time – and time is money.”
In addition to Excel and Word, we use other Office 365 applications such as Outlook for our email. We haven’t seen any changes in to the day-to-day accessing emails, but it does mean that all the information originally held on our exchange server is now held in the Cloud so our server is much more efficient. There are other applications we don’t yet use – for example I know that Office 365 can be used for meetings and conferences, and we might use it for this in the future.”
“We are delighted with the way things have gone. When it came to renewing our Office 365 contract there was no question of going back to the old way of doing things. Now it’s just a case of finding the time to explore its additional benefits.”
“We know it can support what we wanted it to do which is to share information and make it available from anywhere and on any device, but we need to discipline ourselves to find out how to get more from it. Being a smaller business we tend to learn this kind of thing as we go along and progress with things rather than having a ‘grand plan’, but we are certainly reaping more benefits the more we use it!”