Embridge Case Studies
The customer
Quartzelec is a leading independent electrical engineering group delivering design, manufacturing, installation, maintenance and service solutions to customers across industry, infrastructure and the service sector.
With a 100+ year legacy, they are firmly established as a technical authority in the field of rotating electrical machines and as leading Electrical Contractors in both LV and HV services. Supporting initial design through to successful installation and commissioning, they also provide ongoing maintenance to ensure continued efficiency and safety of their customers’ processes.
Operating across the UK and global markets, Quartzelec is an independent organisation employing over 600 people with a turnover in excess of £77 million.
The challenge
Quartzelec has been an on-premises customer of Unit4 since 2009. However, the underlying hardware was coming to end-of-life, which coincided with indications about a Unit4 on-premises end-of-life announcement.
The team agreed that a move to Unit4 Cloud was the best option to maintain compliance. However, they were working in the context of having looked at the web version during a previous upgrade cycle and decided against moving as much of the day-to-day functionality they needed had not, at that point, been made available on web, so there was concern about what functionality was now available.
Quartzelec is a decentralised business, with multiple locations. This means that they have a large number of users with broad roles whose interactions with the system cover multiple activities, as opposed to having groups of people with specific roles using smaller areas of functionality.
Due to underlying hardware coming to end-of-life the timing of year end as well as other projects in the pipeline, timescales were an important factor in this project.
The solution
Having made the decision to move to Unit4 Cloud, Quartzelec knew they would need some assistance to support a system upgrade and their cloud migration.
Having worked with Embridge previously during Unit 4 contract negotiations for the migration, Quartzelec asked for additional support for the subsequent activity where close collaboration would be key to success.
Project management
From the start, Embridge wrapped the process in a governance structure that facilitated the crucial, ongoing feedback ensuring each party knew their responsibilities allowing individual tasks to be carefully managed. The project manager provided an ongoing, single point of contact as well as escalation support with Unit4 when needed. They also helped the Quartzelec team with tasks and prompts, particularly in areas that they might not have thought about.
Upgrade
Quartzelec needed to upgrade from milestone 6 to milestone 7 on Unit4 to facilitate the migration to Unit4 Cloud. The project team agreed that this could be done as part of the migration project as any changes were minimal and it would be more time efficient. This meant that the live system remained at milestone 6 and the cloud system was at milestone 7 when it went live. Changes were identified and managed internally and Embridge did the technical uplift.
Testing
It was recognised early on that testing would play a big part in the success of the migration, so a large amount of effort was focussed on ensuring that all the functionality needed by their users was available on the web version and business unit administrators could re-produce their day-to-day activities on the web. Ensuring an acceptable and successful level of testing was an inherent challenge for the project, due to the volume of users being so high, and the flexibility of Unit4 meaning that there were multiple ways to deliver the same outputs.
Document archive
In Unit4 Cloud, there is a requirement for all documents to be held in the database, which is different from the on-premises situation. This meant Quartzelec also had to migrate their document archive into the database as it had previously been held outside of the system, effectively creating another project under the cloud migration umbrella.
During the migration project, Quartzelec took the opportunity to review and rationalise the size of their document archive to avoid the extra data storage costs they would incur and to future proof the system going forward.
Technical support
There were a few tasks that Quartzelec immediately found that couldn’t be moved to web, so the technical team at Embridge stepped in. In one case, it just took an hour on a call and one of the team was able to write an AG16 as a fix.
“The technical team helped me implement a new AG16 query to fix a process that that we knew we couldn't do once we've migrated over to the web. The fix has been brilliant and you think to yourself, why didn't we do that 10 years ago?”
Olly WrightFinancial Controller at Quartzelec
The results
The Unit4 Cloud migration for Quartzelec was a success, including the migration of the document archive. The team were particularly complementary about Embridge’s project management approach and the level of personal service they received. From a technical delivery standpoint, Olly also added:
“any issue that we’ve had that is beyond our knowledge or experience, there’s someone at Embridge who in most cases done it and able to help”
The whole project was completed in five months, in-line with the planned delivery timeframe.
While it’s still early days following the migration to Unit4 Cloud, Quartzelec is already benefiting from not having hardware to look after or databases to manage from an IT perspective. They also no longer have to take the system down to do things like apply payroll patches, saving the team time and effort.
“The migration went really well, and we genuinely couldn't have done it without Embridge – we couldn't have done it ourselves. And I think the benefit of having a company like Embridge doing it is that it's a lot more personal. That personal touch counts for a lot.”
Olly WrightFinancial Controller at Quartzelec
The future
Embridge is continuing to support Quartzelec as they transition their large user base from desktop to web, providing support on issues where the knowledge is not available internally.
There are also a few other things that they are considering following the fix Embridge implemented for them using and AG16.
“What I did with [the technical team], on an hour-long Teams call has enabled me to think more about our use of AG16s and has opened my eyes to other potential processes that we can use them for.”
Olly WrightFinancial Controller at Quartzelec
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