NOW! Lettings works with top agents across the UK, letting and managing over 1000 residential properties, with tenants and landlords ranging from the UK’s leading blue chip companies to private individuals. As a completely independent company, NOW! Lettings prides itself on working with the best local agents in all locations, and the company’s success largely rests on matching the right tenants to the right properties. Managing these relationships is key to the company’s success.
Because of the reliance on detailed information and the essential need for reliable, flexible and easy access to data, NOW! Lettings’ IT systems are absolutely vital to its core activities. With plans to move to a new office, the company needed a new, multi-platform network (including full mobile and remote access) for its staff team and turned to IT outsourcing specialists ramsac to facilitate it. The project required dedicated and expert knowledge to successfully meet the company’s needs, as Paul Lambert, Director of Finance at NOW Lettings explains, “We couldn’t resource the level of IT network expertise and experience internally through our own team and recruiting a permanent specialist was not a cost effective option. We chose ramsac as our complete IT outsourced partner because they demonstrated that they fully understood our business requirements, they offered the right level of expertise and offered a cost effective, low risk solution to meet our new office needs.”
Robert May, Managing Director of ramsac comments, “The project proved to be a vitally important one to the whole company as not only was NOW! Lettings moving premises, it was also migrating its customer and sales databases from an Oracle database to a Microsoft SQL database - with all the associated information and data transfer needs. We were fully involved from the beginning with NOW! Letting’s office move plan and spent time compiling and discussing a strategic review of the company’s IT needs.
It was essential to take a long-term view and not to just concentrate on the actual move so working in close partnership with NOW! Lettings we put together a business and IT roadmap to plan for the future needs and strategies and to facilitate and maintain the company’s planned business growth.”
ramsac designed the IT infrastructure for the new building and then relocated the entire network from the old office to the new over a weekend, ensuring that there was no down time for any of the users during business hours. The plans ensured that when the staff came in to their new office on Monday morning, they were fully up and running and able to serve their clients. Having moved NOW! Lettings in to their new home, ramsac appointed a dedicated network manager to look after the company on an outsourced, part time basis. As well as overseeing the ongoing stability of the network, the ramsac network manager also rolled out the new SQL database, and started work on virtualising some of NOW! Letting’s servers to reduce their overall hardware requirements.
A Citrix server was installed to enable users to access their full office desktop from any PC, anywhere in the world enabling them to attract a truly mobile workforce, and mobile devices were configured to enable staff to collect emails on the move.
Careful planning and future proofing meant that the office move was as hassle-free as possible, as Lambert comments, “The ramsac team worked really hard to ensure that we experienced limited disruption and we could continue to run our business as normal throughout the office move period.” In the wake of the office move, ramsac also implemented a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and developed a detailed IT upgrade plan with NOW! Lettings, to ensure that the company’s growth can be sustained by its IT infrastructure.
The team at NOW! Lettings feels that along with its IT knowledge and commitment to excellence, ramsac adds a personal touch which has been essential in the professional relationship of trust that has been formed, as Lambert concludes, “The whole ramsac team are very personable and easy to get along with. Along with their professional excellence, it is their understanding of our business needs which makes ramsac stand out from the crowd and we would recommend their services to other organisations in a similar position to ourselves.”