Meldrum Salter Edgley (MSE) was founded in 1889 and today it is one of the leading independent chartered surveyors and estate agents in the South of England. It is a growing business with 40 employees catering for residential and commercial clients.
“We have always been committed to providing the team with the latest information technology available to us, in order to provide our clients with the most efficient and effective service,” comments Senior Partner at MSE, Michael Ginsberg. “Our technology requirement is comparable to businesses much larger than ourselves, yet we have never been able to justify the costs of employing a full time IT manager. In light of this we decided to seek out an alternative approach to managing our IT needs.”
MSE first approached ramsac back in 2000 and Mr Ginsberg recalls his first impressions, “ramsac was, as it still is today, one of the innovators in the provision of outsourced IT support services to businesses in South East.”
When ramsac conducted an audit of the existing IT infrastructure at each of MSE‘s four sites - the head office in Guildford, a second office also in the town and two offices located in Cranleigh and Godalming - it was immediately clear they would be starting from the bottom up. “In one office we had little or no IT in place, in fact at the time one of our offices didn’t even have a fax machine,” adds Mr Ginsberg. Since then, ramsac has specified, installed and maintained all of the IT hardware, much of the software as well as the internal processes (such as an efficient data backup strategy) that the company has needed to ensure that it continues to deliver the quality-of-service clients expect from the longest established firm of Chartered Surveyors in the region.
Today, ramsac manages 50 devices across a four-site Windows-based IT network for MSE Property. The majority of the software including all Microsoft applications (ramsac is a Gold Certified Microsoft Partner) are also supported by ramsac.
MSE Property also uses specialist software such as Propman, dezrez and Sage who all provide individual service and support, however Mr Ginsberg cites one particular issue with a system upgrade that ramsac was also able to resolve. “We use Propman software as our property management application and when an upgrade is required it can be a complex process. However, ramsac took full responsibility for the upgrade and ensured it ran smoothly, without causing any disruption to our day-to-day business.”
The company also benefits from ramsac’s telephone support service, “The service they provide is always friendly and incredibly useful, especially with their remote support, where the support team at ramsac are able to ‘take control’ of the problem PC or laptop to swiftly diagnose and fix the problem,” enthuses Mr Ginsberg.
As well as providing these important reactive support services, ramsac also takes a hands-on and proactive approach with the ongoing maintenance of the sites and the development of MSE’s IT infrastructure to ensure that it continues to be aligned with the business needs of the company. MSE is assigned a dedicated IT manager, from ramsac, who makes scheduled visits to the company once or twice a month to administer upgrades, manage software licenses, troubleshoot any issues, as well as strategic guidance from their assigned IT director who listens and understands MSE’s current business challenges and objectives in order to offer guidance regarding how IT can help to overcome and achieve them.
ramsac has been diligently looking after the evolving IT requirements of MSE for more than eight years. “The team at ramsac have played a huge part in maintaining the highest standards we continually strive for,” explains Mr Ginsberg. “They know our systems inside out and although it is referred to as outsourcing we view our working relationship with them as much closer than that.”
Mr Ginsberg concludes, “We have complete trust in the team at ramsac to take care of our IT needs. They provide a confident, efficient and friendly service and have always risen to the challenge whenever we have needed them to. It is fair to say that ramsac is our IT department”