Who are the Fishmongers’ Company?
The Fishmongers’ Company is one of the oldest and most ancient Livery Companies of the City of London, one of the ‘Great Twelve.’ For 700 years it has stood on the banks of the River Thames playing a leading role in upholding the standards in the trading of fish and shellfish. A role it continues today, as well as making a significant contribution to the UK fishing sector and other non-fishery areas through our Philanthropy and Grants projects.
The Challenge
With the complexity of the Fishmongers’ Company’s financial requirements was increasing, the needs of the business had moved on and the business system needed to reflect those changes. Therefore, the decision was made to look for a new ERP solution. The search began for a Microsoft Dynamics Partner that could help them with this transition.
The Solution
Following a review of leading UK Partners, Advantage was selected to transition the Dynamics NAV solution into their business. As well as this, following some initial discussions about whether to move to the Cloud, the Fishmongers’ Company also chose Advantage based on the fact that they were able to help them integrate their NAV solution into Microsoft Azure and manage it for them.
Following the successful implementation of the Dynamics NAV solution in the Cloud, it was only realised at this point that the Managed Services team at Advantage were heavily involved in helping them integrate their new NAV solution into the Cloud in the first place.
Following on from this and after learning more about the IT managed services that Advantage offered, they began to make use of Advantage’s managed services more:
- They first called in Advantage when they had a significant network issue which resulted in Advantage heading onsite on the same day to resolve the issue in super quick time.
- Following on from the above, Advantage were asked to complete a fully comprehensive network audit which resulted in the replacing of all switches and firewall as well as discussing moving the on-premise servers to Microsoft Azure. Once this was completed, the Fishmongers’ Company had made the move to the complete cloud with Azure and 365.
- As the Fishmongers’ Company saw the significant benefits achieved through Advantage’s work, the in-house IT team decided to make use of Advantage’s Managed Services IT Support team as an escalation to theirs, covering holiday and 3rd line issues that they felt they wanted to escalate.
- Following from the successes achieved above, the Fishmongers’ Company were keen to improve their security, Advantage were appointed to undertake a security audit which highlighted the need for them to add new layers and strengthen their security even further.
- Within the last month, Advantage has helped the Fishmongers’ Company to achieve significant savings on their licensing by moving their O365 subscriptions over to Advantage from their previous supplier. As well as this, Advantage also ordered a 1GB internet circuit to improve the speed and stability for the events they run in the Hall & implemented an EDR solution/SentinelOne to prevent any ransomware attacks on their IT fleet.
Benefits
After initially coming to Advantage for an ERP solution, the Fishmongers’ Company found that the comprehensive IT solutions that Advantage offered had helped them to well and truly revolutionise their business and helped them to achieve a number of game changing benefits.
Gareth Coulthard, Head of IT & Communications for the Fishmongers Company was evidently delighted “Having come to Advantage initially for a new ERP solution for our business, we couldn’t believe how much value we could gain out of using Advantage’s wide range of IT services to help us to transform the way we worked. We can’t thank Christo and the IT team at Advantage enough for their range of knowledge & expertise in helping us to improve our business. If you are looking for one of the best IT companies to help you with your IT requirements then you have found them in Advantage.”
Christo van Zyl, Managed Service Director at Advantage added “We’re extremely delighted to see the value and the tangible benefits that Gareth and the team have experienced by using our full repertoire of managed services to place their business in the best possible position to grow further”.
Conclusion
With the transition to Dynamics NAV having been completed, Advantage continue to fully support the Fishmongers’ Company with their specific IT needs and will continue to do so well into the future.
