The Nicholls & Clarke Group is a business dedicated to the manufacturing, distribution and retailing of quality building products. With 24 UK locations and over 550 employees to support, effective support infrastructure was something of a challenge to Narendra Joshi, Head of IT. “Previously we used a home grown Service Desk system” explains Narendra, “However, in an ITIL compliant environment like ours, where all IT staff are ITIL trained, we felt that we needed to make the investment in a platform that would rise to meet our operational standards and grow with us into the future.”
Following a comprehensive market review, Nicholls & Clark selected Sunrise Software for its technology, its people and for the company’s pragmatic and understated approach. “We liked the flexibility that the software platform’s modular approach presented to us,” adds Joshi. “It means that we can take a phased approach and grow across the business. The browser based interface is ideal for our environment and, coupled with the software’s integration with social media, showed Sunrise to be a really forward thinking company.”
Initial implementation is in the IT department, where Sunrise ITSM is providing a comprehensive Service Desk solution that will be especially beneficial in supporting the group’s ITSM best practice approach. The system will provide support for each of the 100+ merchant trade account, desktop, manufacturing, distribution, ERP and financial systems that need to be maintained across the 24 sites.
Nicholls & Clarke plan to create a software Asset Management system that is heavily influenced by ITIL best practice. It will support the creation and management of a group-wide software library so that the IT team will be able to track and manage software versions, license management and renewals planning by using Sunrise ITSM’s comprehensive reporting functions.
The next step will include extending the roll-out to the customer services team; providing a support desk infrastructure to track and monitor operational and business issues ranging from pricing enquiries to business processes, order queries and web order support.
By extending this single platform further across the business, Nicholls & Clarke hope to create more efficient internal processes and gain better insight into daily business operations. This will allow the group to identify knowledge gaps and develop and grow its already strong training and coaching exercises for the people that are on the Service Desk.
Geoff Rees, Sales Director at Sunrise Software commented “organisations like Nicholls & Clarke that have seen strong organic expansion often out-grow their existing software systems. The business benefits of moving to a fully integrated Service Management Platform that can span all service and customer facing functions, without the overhead of maintaining an in-house developed system, are wide-reaching; enabling the business to operate more efficiently, provide better customer service and better information to support commercial business decisions.”