Improving efficiency with a full IT upgrade for WH Barley

About WH Barley

W H Barley (Transport & Storage) Limited provide Palletised Distribution for the domestic and European markets, along with general road haulage, secure commercial storage and warehousing solutions.

The Challenge

W H Barley are a business with limited internal IT resource, The IT systems at WH Barley have grown organically as the company have expanded, so they were running with ageing hardware and software and were proving to be inefficient and difficult to manage. There were also issues affecting the reliability of email, which was having an impact on productivity.

One major challenge we faced was introducing new technology onto their system, whilst ensuring operability with their existing line of business applications. This was made even more difficult due to old legacy applications which were running on XP, and some of those applications simply not working on the new operating system.

This issue was resolved with careful planning which took place with third party vendors.

WH Barley currently run a 24/7 operation so we had to ensure we migrated their systems with minimal user impact.

Our Solution

To ensure we delivered the best solution, the project was planned using our four stage process, which allowed us to plan, manage and oversee all aspects of the migration. With several onsite visits we were able to undertake an analysis of their current IT infrastructure and gain a thorough understanding of the business requirements.

We were then able to recommend a solution which would support the business going forward and improve efficiency. The solution included -

• Implementing new HP Desktops, running Windows 7 and Office 2013
• Migrating their email servers to Office 365
• Implement application servers
• Deploy pro-active support tools