EMW Industrial went through a period of significant growth. With new offices located in both Canada and the US they quickly found that they needed an additional level of support, a proactive approach to solving problems, and experience with larger entities that their existing IT provider was able to provide.
Many of the challenges we had were very minor. The majority of the issues were related to changing the overall culture of the organization to change the way they interacted with IT and get them used to that process.
Any time an organization is required to change how something is accomplished there is bound to be some resistance to change. As many of the employees were used to just walking down to the IT office and asking for help, having them email or contact the service desk took some hand holding. Lexcom solved this by engaging the business units one on one and making sure that everyone had posted service desk contact information and the proper procedures readily available. Even after all of the efforts many employees waited till our staff were onsite to share issues.
In a busy organization where employees are always in and out of the office it wasat times difficult to coordinate with employees. As some employees had tight deadlines it was difficult to interrupt them during the day. We solved this by taking a customer service approach. Working on critical issues immediately and nuisances after hours.
The manual deployment of computer equipment was a process that consumed a lot of time. We implemented automated deployment procedures to significantly improve the deployment process and those improvements resulted in lower support calls.
The existing provider also did not maintain a comprehensive asset management database. One of the main initiatives we took was to better understand the assets under support and put in the necessary controls to ensure our database was always up to date. This allowed us to proactively identify hardware that was off warranty and track software license renewals.
Cyber Security and keeping the employees educated on how to identify phishing attacks, unsafe website, links and emails not to open etc. was also a challenge. We incorporated many layers of automation to help protect the company from cyber security attacks and supplemented the technology with regular notifications and training.
Having the Lexcom staff join your team to assist with day to day support and technical projects hasallowed the EMW IT team to focus on business initiatives. Their support team has been extremely responsive when issues arise, and they have been a friendly and knowledgeable partner for EMW. Lexcom is always on the lookout to improve the experience of our employees. It has been a pleasure to work with them and we recommend their services.