Sector: Construction / Development
Since 1998 CSG and Dale Maintenance have been working together to help build a more resilient IT structure. When Dale Maintenance approached CSG, they had 3 computers and needed some invoice support. This is when CSG introduced Opera and from there Dale Maintenance developed a new understanding for technology advancements, which led to the partnership between CSG and Dale Maintenance.
Dale Maintenance now have 90 vans, 5 office locations and 120 employees across South Wales, Southwest and South Midlands, all the way across to Reading.
The background
The management team at Dale Maintenance emphasised the need for a personal 1-1 experience with their IT partner. This is something that CSG take pride in offering clients, ensuring that any questions are answered by their dedicated CSG account manager.
Within the maintenance services industry there is an increasing demand to digitalise communications, quality control, invoicing and payments, GPS tracking, weather reports and more. Having an integrated approach to these areas allows subcontractors to be sourced and paid faster, which is an increasing demand within the industry.
Customers and staff within the maintenance industry expect the latest technological advancements in their day-today at work. The ongoing daily support that CSG provides Dale Maintenance ensures that their organisation can keep up with the latest demands, from increased security threats to connecting staff from different sites.
How having CSG as an IT Partner has improved IT Systems
“We’ve invested more than other people in the industry into our IT services, which shows the importance for the IT infrastructure if you want to be successful – we’ve gained a competitive advantage thanks to CSG.” – Dale Maintenance.
Dale Maintenance noticed how over the last 10 years, their customers in their core client group all migrated to using IT solutions on site. This meant that when Dale’s engineers visited clients’ sites, they would be required to fill in a number of different questions which were all stored in their systems including what time engineers logged in and out – Dale Maintenance felt that there must have been a more strategic approach to this, which is where CSG came in to support.
24/7 support
There is a growing demand for companies to operate 24/7 and Dale Maintenance is no different in this approach. All Dale’s customers, from supermarkets to pub chains, are open all night and there is no set time for an email or internet access issue to occur!
“Some weekends we can have an issue with emails or our phone systems, I have on occasion rang CSG via their 24/7 service and we received instant support on the weekend. We wouldn’t be able to continue our 24/7 services to our customers without CSG and their out of hours support is critical to our business.”
Ultrafast fibre internet
Having an IT partner that takes the time to understand your business and the unique details about your industry can lead to more than just an IT partner, but a strategic business partner that helps you in more areas than IT.
“This kind act which we would have never expected shows the extra mile that CSG goes to find better solutions for their customers.”
For any organisation looking for an IT partner who values saving them money, this example is a perfect way to express how CSG supports clients in saving money, CSG helped Dale Maintenace save around £7,000 per annum with the migration of voice services from more traditional service and provides a far better more fluid solution to suit the needs of the organisation.
“CSG go the extra mile and use their knowledge to save the team money, using their own initiatives.”
Network security
Our firewall solutions have been instrumental in supporting Dale Maintenance’s network infrastructure. By implementing a dual-firewall configuration, Dale Maintenance ensures continuous connectivity and seamless failover of traffic and services.
This setup effectively eliminates downtime, maintaining uninterrupted network operations, a critical aspect for a company with extensive reach across South Wales, Southwest and South Midlands.
“The process has gone very smoothly. It’s a reliable and trustworthy system that we have complete trust in.”
Cloud migration
This year, there has been a growing demand for businesses to move to the cloud due to enhanced security measures and the convenience of easy access, which collectively streamline operations and fortify data protection.
“I’m not expert on the tech involved, we needed someone who was credited to help us move to the cloud.”
James then goes onto express how the company invests a lot of their money in IT and were looking to find guidance on how to best spend their IT budget.
“It was a lot less stressful moving to the cloud than we thought. CSG made the cloud system simple and flexible to our needs. CSG removed all the complex work involved from our side so that we could continue to get on with what we do best.”
“If we can’t get on the internet at the Dale office in Cardiff then our employees won’t have work. With all the systems that CSG helped set up for us, if an office goes down now then it doesn’t impact other offices. We have the internet and firewall on the cloud so if anything goes down, we can work from anywhere.”
To get a better idea of the importance of this support, James expresses how around 700 invoices a month are sent out on average, “If CSG weren’t there to support our systems and provide us with resilient back up solutions then we wouldn’t see this turnover.”
Cyber security
Around 30% of Dale Maintenance’s business is within the insurance industry, which are all governed by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority). The security demands of the FCA are extensive and range from requiring certain firewalls to needing to abide by the data regulations set by the EU/UK.
“We need to ensure that our security meets the demands for the insurance industry.” Everything at Dale Maintenance involves data protection and for Dale’s domestic customers, data protection is a top priority.
The specific requirements surrounding security, organisations can sometimes become overwhelming for organisations. This is where CSG’s expertise comes in to provide managed support with:
- Backup
- Disaster recovery
- Security hardening
Dale Maintenance has around 120 employees, meaning the risk of human error is extremely high. There is a constant demand for organisations to ensure that all staff understand the latest security requirements that organisations need to meet.
The cic’s guidelines, released by the CIOB and Building Research Establishment, serve as a resource for this purpose. Similarly, government bodies have also issued digital security guidelines for the industry, such as the Cybersecurity Framework by NIST.
“CSG provide us (Dale Maintenance) with regular audits to ensure we match these requirements and will provide support and solutions if there are any areas we need to improve on. CSG will always give us an email or call and keeps us up to date on the latest developments, such as the 4G issues with the local signal and the CSG team provided us with a solution for this before us even having to ask them.”
Reduce paper use
Dale Maintenance picks up around 600 jobs a week and they needed to find a way to reduce the amount of paper used and manual workload to invoice all the separate jobs. “We were looking at around 18,000 pieces of paper printed a week, this was a massive cost to both us and the environment.”
“With CSG’s guidance and expertise, we were able to reduce this massive cost to the business and digitalise services through 365, helping us meet our goal of becoming more environmentally conscious.”
