Can UBR Technology Services improve your whole business?

The sad statistic is that half of all new businesses will close within the first few years after they begin. There is no single reason behind this statistic, instead a range of factors, including external macro-economic conditions, make starting a new business a challenge. As UBR Tech approaches its ninth birthday we’re happy to report that we are continuing to grow strongly, but… we have begun to notice an interesting trend within our customer’s businesses … they are ALL doing well. In some cases very well – some more than doubling in size.

You might expect to have a few big winners over a nine year period, but what is surprising is that there have been few failures, or even downsizing. Statistically speaking, there appears to be a uniform trend amongst our customers to perform well. Our IT services customers operate across a wide range of verticals - construction, healthcare, business consulting, property, not-for-profit, finance, etc, so there should be plenty of natural variation.

So it is just dumb luck, or there something else going on?

There are few benefits that we’ve noticed that our managed services brings to all our customers:

Business Focus - The move away from managing technology towards purchasing an IT outcome has allowed our customers up to spend more time focusing on their unique business value.

Standardisation - The work we put into creating processes to support our managed services scope, has a “knock-on” effect on many other parts of our customer’s business – helping them to standardise and clarify IT’s touchpoints with HR, finance, asset management, etc.

Improved Procurement Strategy - In some cases the success of our “utility model” approach to managed services has led our customers to apply this strategy to other service suppliers.

Outstanding Execution - We believe we do managed services right – in an industry where it is often done very badly.

But, why we’d like to take all the credit for our customer’s successes!, the reality is that whilst good IT services assist our customers it doesn’t create their success. The common thread appears to be that businesses that choose UBR Tech's services are different from the average organisation. There are certainly plenty of alternatives. In fact the majority of small to medium business still choose either time and materials support or their own in-house staff. So it seems that businesses who understand the superior value of managed services are making high quality decisions across the whole of their business.

This appears to be a classic case of selection bias – it’s not just luck that all of our customer’s are doing well – the very fact that they are our customers says a lot about their business strategy and their decision making processes.

In short, it appears that any organisation that chooses

UBR Tech's services has qualities that are likely to make them highly successful in their chosen field.

Paul is the owner and manager of UBR Technology Services.

Prior to starting UBR Technology Services, Paul's work history was as a senior IT executive acknowledged for capacity to harness the power of people and technologies to build consistency, efficiency and a customer-first mindset. From strategy and direction, through relationship building, change and project management, expertise has been honed in understanding business pressure points and drivers, embracing accountability and a common commitment to excellence. Participative leader, strategist and champion of new opportunities, high standards and ways to deliver solutions.

- Headed investigation and drove new technical architecture in an environment where timeframes for system issue resolution had been expressed in years. Partnered with developer to create custom application—a single corporate system with central reporting that would eliminate 80 centres operating independently with 40+ software combinations. The groundbreaking enterprise-wide ERP system became recognised as a trailblazer in the medical sector.

- Transformed technology process culture into a customer service based IT community, embedded with quality, consistency, adaptability and the right attitude.

- Devised asset control system cited during Microsoft audit for software compliance as “The most comprehensive asset control system seen, superior to system implemented at BHP.”

2007–2009, LINCOLN SENTRY GROUP, Group IT Manager

Company: Leading Australian supplier and distributor of hardware and components. $33M turnover, 20,000 product lines through 30 distribution centres and branches nationally and in New Zealand.

Confronted upon commencement with an IT department in need of new strategic visions and direction. The decaying infrastructure neglected for many years, continued to be undermined—lacking asset control and dynamic talent, and struggling with the effects of silo mentality, flawed system design and antiquated equipment. Within two years, the division was transformed from a technology “fix it” mindset into a customer-service focused culture complete with contemporary policies, efficiency improvements, reduced risk, consistency and quality.

Initial Contributions:

- Jumpstarted the first asset control system in the company’s history in the first 30 days. While the fledgling system was initially rudimentary, reinforced the philosophy of asset management to become a responsibility for all, starting with all staff recording asset details upon use.

- Within 2 months, eliminated retail-level purchasing regime and ignited vendor interest by selecting a single vendor for PCs and notebooks. From an ad hoc approach with no bulk discounts ever received, generated savings of $400 per workstation and $1000 per notebook.

- Established a steering group to unite state managers in a spirit of consensus to discuss discrete aims for technology services and prioritisation.

Enduring Contributions:

JDE Rejuvenation Project: Delivered 10-month, $270K JDE enhancement project to improve system stability and performance on time and on budget. Historically poor implementations, no updates since inception and more had prompted frequent outages, poor efficiency, and ongoing bandaid solutions.

Conceived strategy for system development including long-term plan for hardware, updates, feature implementations, and recommendation to phase hardware over five-year lifecycle. Averted scope creep, and introduced a genuine testing environment prior to placing modifications and patches in production.

Delivered impressive gains in system responsiveness and stability. Unplanned outages dropped from two hours a month to two a year, while invoice printing was cut from 10 minutes to eight seconds, and three-day end of month processes to mere hours.

Risk Management: Identified significant risk to data and hardware and built compelling and successful case for transitioning from outmoded onsite server room, to a contemporary data centre. Where no practical plans existed following server failure, redundancy was embedded across all core IT infrastructure and servers with data synchronously replicated.

WAN Revitalisation: Cut cost of WAN links from $23,000 to $9,000 a month, reduced installation timeframes from 12 weeks to 10 business days, and negotiated immediate support guarantees from new communications vendor.

Asset Control: Devised comprehensive set of policies and procedures, cited during Microsoft audit for software compliance as “The most comprehensive asset control system seen, superior to system implemented at BHP”.

JDE Software Development: Instituted service culture and established a project coordinator to champion and enforce delivery timelines. Development work frequently met just 50% of the time rose to 85%.

EDI Portal: Reduced burden on sales and accounts staff, by providing a key self-service interface for customers to place orders and access account information.

Server Virtualisation/Consolidation: Generated $50,000 in savings, consolidating nine servers to two.

Quality and Consistency: Eliminated random/inconsistent workstation and server builds of the past by spearheading the introduction of formal documentation that layered quality on consistency.

Resource Case Building: Won executive green light to secure resources to provide helpdesk support, freeing system administrators to maintain systems.

2002–2007, INDEPENDENT PRACTITIONER NETWORK, IT Technical Manager, IT Operations Manager. Budget: $500K (non-project work) $2M annually (ERP project).

Company: Australia’s largest facilities and infrastructure provider to the healthcare industry. .

Widespread divisional disarray prompted an immediate resolution to champion change and win support for a series of broad based remedial solutions that became industry-firsts for Australia. Top of the list was to introduce preferred vendors for national standardisation, followed by centralised support for the 1200 PC network, and unified communication through a central internet connection and WAN.

Within two years, PCs and servers were supported centrally and a wide area network deployed complete with remote access technologies embedded into the standard operating environment. For the first time, workflows were controlled, prioritised and executed.

The pioneering ERP/CRM system provided central visibility of patient volumes, central control and reporting of finances, and electronic transportable patient records—along with the ability for any medical centre to book patient appointments in others across the network.

- Conceived and developed the company’s first PC and server standard operating environments. Validated document, produced Active Directory / DNS and replication designs along with physical and logic WAN topology.

- Transformed ad hoc approach to data security and backups that posed potential exposure of confidential medical records. Devised solution for IT to assume full control replicating, backing up and validating data from local sites to a central repository SAN.

- Future proofed PBX communications investment via transition to VoIP that introduced call routing for more than 10,000 inbound and outbound calls weekly. Greater efficiency in call routing and responsive answering at nearby centres prevented lost business to competitors.

- Launched distributed call centre that eliminated call response burden from busy medical staff.

- Vastly improved the perception of the IT department as the last place to contact for assistance to a Mecca of all technical knowledge with almost universally positive feedback.

- Negotiated equipment and service agreement level contract with Dell that was 1.8% less than part owner—an $800 million company with powerful influence.