Strategic IT Partner to Campus Oil
Campus Oil is a fourth-generation family-run company that has undergone a digital transformation since it began working with Innovate ten years ago.
With impressive growth spanning multiple decades, Campus Oil found itself spending a considerable amount of time managing an ageing ICT estate.
Campus Oil's management were quick to identify this as an area that was not core to their own organisation's mission and outside help was sought.
Innovate performed a review of the entire ICT estate and presented one solution that would allow Campus Oil to consolidate their entire IT and Communications overhead into one monthly investment.
This relationship has grown over the last decade and Innovate now provide connectivity, communications, cloud technology and security solutions into all depot locations nationwide. These services are all supported through Innovate's 24/7 Helpdesk.
"It's Innovate people that are the true differentiator, their technical acumen and ability to always put the customer at the centre of everything - that's their magic sauce." said Brendan Roche, administration manager of Campus Oil.
"Innovate is a critical part of our business. We can do without certain other services, but we can't do without our IT services and our contract with Innovate is paramount to our business."
"From a technical support point of view, we need people we can call on to react to critical incidents and Innovate have been extremely good to us in that respect.
"We have a very good SLA in place that includes 24-hour out-of-office cover, which is very important because our business doesn't work 9-to-5 anymore.
"And in the event we run into major issues, I also have direct access to all senior managers, including CEO Jim Hughes.
"Fortunately we don't have to invoke that very often, but the odd time we have had an out-of-hours issue that was a bit more serious, we have been able to get those people on the phone when needed and get the matter resolved.
"The relationship between ourselves and Innovate has grown over the past ten years and they have become a strategic part of what we are doing. We would have a very, very good working relationship with Innovate."
Campus Oil's unprecedented growth meant that while the organisation consistently outperformed the market, technology struggled to keep apace.
They were putting considerable time and effort into maintaining their onsite server infrastructure, PCs, line-of-business applications, Wide Area Network connections, routers, switches; the list goes on – and the list of service providers was equally as long.
"In our previous office in Sandyford, we were at serious risk from a disaster recovery point of view and even just from a day-to-day running point of view, because we were operating out of an office without the proper infrastructure in place," Brendan said.
"Innovate came in, took a look at our operation and provided us with a proposal as to how we should improve. We had a couple of proposals on the table and we went with what Innovate recommended as the best way forward.
"Innovate recommended we move all our equipment to a data centre and DR site, and from that point on we became totally reliant on Innovate to provide all our technical expertise and IT infrastructure.
"To add more into the mix, we then moved from our offices in Sandyford to where we are now based in Bray.
"As you can imagine, that move involved quite a lot of setting up from an IT perspective. which again we brought Innovate in on.
"Innovate were able to set it up and put the whole infrastructure in place – lines, broadband, you name it. They were a huge help to us moving into that premises, to the point where we were basically able to plug-and-play when we arrived. That was a massive help at the time because we had a very short window in order to move in."
Campus Oil's business has transformed significantly over the past ten years and the company is now the largest supplier of fuel oil direct to the consumer in the eastern half of Ireland.
During this impressive growth phase Campus Oil was forced to turn its back on long-established business processes and adopt forward-thinking technology.
"Traditionally in the oil business everything was written down. Orders were taken over the phone, drivers wrote out dockets and all these were processed manually," Brendan said.
"Our company has fundamentally changed and we are now virtually a paperless business with orders processed electronically.
"We rely on our IT system considerably now, so any hiccups in any part of our chain will have a potentially huge impact on the flow of the business. So to have an IT partner is critical from our point of view, because without the services provided we wouldn't be able to operate.
"This is a million miles ahead of where we were ten years ago, which has allowed us to stay to the forefront of the industry ahead of our competitors."
Jim Hughes and Brendan Roche IT Manager Campus Oil
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