Founded in 1997, Emeg is a railway M&E engineering services provider and offers a range of depot and office design, construction, infrastructure, and service products Emeg offers turnkey inhouse solutions to all projects from new build, enhancement & refurbishment works in UK and UAE. Long term clients include Network Rail, Etihad, Northern Rail, Saudi Rail, Great Western Railways (GWR), London Underground, East Midlands Trains, Virgin Trains, and a host of major blue-chip contractors.
Emeg was running its IT infrastructure on-premise, on in-house servers across 2 sites. This was managed by an external provider which meant that the company had little control over its own systems. As the servers were coming to the end of their life, Emeg received an expensive quote to replace them. Already using Microsoft technology, this was the catalyst to look at Microsoft365 and move from a Capex to Opex spend.
The decision was made to set up using Azure and the other Microsoft365 services such as SharePoint and Office365. So Emeg started to look around for a new more value-conscious provider who could also give some help and advice on developing digitally whilst allowing the Emeg team to build some of these important skills in-house.
To kick off the project, Rob Burrows, Solution Architect at Emeg contacted Microsoft to see who they would recommend as an Azure Gold Partner. After receiving a list to choose from, Rob had an initial call with a consultant from Compete366. As Rob explains “We were impressed with Compete366 from the outset. Their vision matched ours, and we felt they were better suited to helping us than other providers. We could purchase our Microsoft Azure through them, with the added benefit that they would provide us with free advice and guidance – allowing us to build up our in-house best practice.”
The Azure experts at Compete366 worked with Emeg to implement the following solutions: SharePoint and Office365, Azure Storage accounts (File Shares), Azure App Service & Azure SQL Databases, Azure Backup.
Emeg has over 50 people in the business, excluding on-site teams, split across four locations in the UK, and has recently expanded with offices in Dubai and a new manufacturing facility in Chesterfield.
As Rob explains “The Microsoft Cloud infrastructure that we’ve implemented is great. It allows us to share files and work on shared projects, or simply just jump on Teams calls for a conversation about a project as well as automating various time-consuming tasks, freeing up staff to work on more cost-effective work and providing the opportunity to explore AI features which provide more accurate reporting across the business. We are also saving money, as we pay less on licences now, and don’t have any physical server costs to pay.”
Rob describes their working experience with Compete366 “It’s been good – very seamless – and we’ve had no problems. When we have a new starter in the business, it’s completely painless to add a new licence – all we have to do is submit a request to Compete366 and it’s done. We’ve also received some great advice from them on implementing facial recognition for security, I’d read quite a lot about it online but the consultant at Compete366 was able to complete the picture and also sent us some very useful blogs too.”
“We find the team very easy to work with, I don’t have to worry as they always get things get done and are very responsive. Advice is just an email or phone call away which has also allowed us to increase our in -house skills and that saves costs too.”
Emeg is already using Azure storage, MS365 has automated the process for email filing and referencing, to create a solution to allow for meta-data tagging to facilitate searching for the right file.
Now that the team is more familiar with facial recognition, plans are in place to implement this for Depot protection.
Emeg is also looking at PowerBI & AI to streamline the reporting process for monthly management figures and allow the senior team to see all their business data in one place, and remove the time required to produce manual reports.
If you’d like to find out how our Azure experts can help you set up your IT infrastructure in the most effective way then do get in touch. We’ll be pleased to help.
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