GCS Recruitment Specialists Case Study
“We made a very big decision to move away from someone we’d had known for so long. It could have gone very wrong; instead it flourished. IT has grown in stature within the organisation, and I’m very pleased with that.” – Grahame Winman, Business Systems Manager, GCS Ltd
GCS Recruitment Specialists successfully transition from in-house to out-sourced IT support. Founded in 1991 as a two-man operation specialising strictly in IT recruitment, GCS Recruitment Specialists (GCS) now has a turnover of over £30m, employs over 80 staff and has evolved into one of the UK’s leading multi-sector recruitment businesses.
GCS’ unique approach and value-added services saw the business continue to flourish right through the recession. However, under the pressure of growth and expansion the in-house IT support team could not meet demand, and GCS quickly recognised that its IT needs were rapidly expanding beyond their own capabilities.
Grahame Winman, GCS’ Business Systems Manager, along with the company’s Finance Director, started to investigate alternatives and quickly whittled a list of 10-15 IT companies down to a shortlist of only 3.
On meeting with Datek one of the first questions asked was why Datek thought it would be better to outsource IT rather than continue to manage in-house? Datek’s experience in working with other businesses with exactly the same challenges had shown how difficult it is for IT Managers to keep abreast of every new technology when they have been employed to look after one specific environment.
By implementing Datek’s proven 3-stage process the transition was fast, efficient and cost-effective, with no down-time for the business throughout. GCS had no doubt that this situation very much reflected its own. “Our business was going from strength to strength and whilst things weren’t actually broken, we were beginning to experience some significant challenges with IT’s ability to meet the business’ demands.”
Datek was able to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the existing systems and after three months, a smooth handover from the in-house IT team to Datek took place.
Within GCS, Grahame was praised for his handling of the transition and for choosing the right partner. As a result, he received a Most Valued Professional (MVP) award at GCS annual awards event, in recognition of his part in this successful IT move.
Time for a new infrastructure
It was soon clear to Datek that the expensive, out of date and complicated IT system in place was slowing GCS down and creating unnecessary stress for its users. GCS’ IT infrastructure was running on a complex and expensive 14 server system. The company was using a mixture of outdated Windows Server 2003 and 2008 technology, and after an air conditioning failure in the server room of their Reading branch, it became obvious that a centralised virtual solution in an environment controlled datacentre was the way forward.
Datek embarked on a new project with GCS to overhaul its entire infrastructure and transform it into a future-proof and resilient system, moving the whole IT estate to a new data centre.
“Usually, with change comes disruption – some element of outage or lack of productivity in some area. This wasn’t the case with Datek. At no point have we gone backward, we have only gone forward.” – Grahame Winman, Business Systems Manager, GCS
