IT Services and Telephone Systems Case Study

Business Blooms With Updated IT System
ROCC – IT Partners to Blooms of Bressingham

Overview
In the past 10 years gardens have become arenas of intense interest. We have seen a surge in garden makeover programmes on television, an increase in garden-related magazines and a boom in garden centre trade. With the added introduction of Sunday opening, garden centres have become more of a leisure destination appealing to a greater audience.

As a consequence of this, the sector saw an explosive period of growth in both consumer footfall and spend.

Blooms of Bressingham
Blooms of Bressingham have long been a highly respected name in gardening circles worldwide and has a chain of 10 garden centres located throughout England.

Originally a part of the famous Bloom family business, which was founded in the early 50's, the business was sold to Flying Flowers in the mid 1990’s and was subsequently bought out by Chris Bertram. He formed the new company Blooms of Bressingham Ltd. The company then acquired Jardinerie in 2001 and moved head office to Gloucester where they undertook a major re-focusing and expansion of their garden centres. Blooms recognised that people were looking for garden centres to be more of a lifestyle destination store, something that offered them not only gardening but furniture and gifts.

The Technology Challenge
Blooms had managed on a basic network of one PC per centre and a dial up email connection that provided communication between them all. This system had been in place for about 7 years and whilst it worked reasonably well, it was dated, couldn’t process the demands of current usage quickly enough, or the amount of email traffic that was growing all the time, and the system was beginning to let them down.

Security was also an issue as there was no control on staff access to the Internet and downloads brought the inevitable vulnerability of virus attack. The amount of SPAM emails received was huge due to email addresses being published on the website. Back up’s were a concern, as there was no centralised facility each centre was responsible for it's own data. Communication between the centres had become frustratingly slow due to the significant increase in the volume of data being distributed and email activity. More and more data was being sent between the centres by dial up modem, and all of which was exacerbating the problems and causing inefficiency.

Blooms didn’t have their own in-house IT team and they had been dealing successfully with ROCC for a number of years so they asked them to come up with a solution to their IT problems. Paul Jones, ROCC’s Network Sales Manager who managed the project tells us: “Blooms needed to find a way of joining all their business units together and to have a IT platform that would take them into the future. What made the challenge of a new system even more exciting was that the existing communication system had to be maintained whilst the new system was implemented.”

The Solution
Blooms created a wish list of what they wanted, which formed the brief. This was to specify a solution that would cope with the growth of their business and improve communications into head office and the installation of new Internet capability. ROCC provided a couple of options for a solution with various cost plans. Blooms ran through these options with ROCC and agreed on the best solution that met their needs and budget.

It was obvious that in order to achieve a more refined system, Blooms needed to change their system rather than upgrade the existing one. So work commenced with three HP ProLiant Rack servers installed at head office running Windows Server 2003 R2. They were to be assigned as file and print, Microsoft Exchange 2003 and the accounts system servers. A Juniper Netscreen 25 Firewall was installed to provide an end-to-end VPN (virtual private network) between head office and each individual site. New work stations and a Juniper 5GT ADSL firewall provided additional and created the link back to head office. Additionally A3 printers were installed at all centres to enable them to produce more of their own marketing materials.

Paul Jones added that: “Three new email accounts were being provided for each site to improve individual departmental communications with head office. Whilst this introduction was made it was vital that all messages to the old email addresses were still received, whilst filtering out the SPAM email.”

Wireless access was installed in all centres for the use of mobile staff. This was located in cafeterias to enable simplicity of use and meant that operations managers were able to keep in contact via their laptops, no matter which centre they were located in. Staff are able to send and receive messages and there is now greater control on internet access. Along with new back-up disk drives this allows all centres to keep an additional copy of their data.

Once the Head Office install had taken place, 2 further centres were rolled out per week. The garden centre at Bicester was undergoing a huge redevelopment at the same time as the network installation so a temporary wireless access network was installed to accommodate the project managers’ requirements. The temporary network has been replaced and due to the sheer size of the Bicester site it now has it’s own server and 14 pc’s.

The new system installation has enabled Blooms to introduce swipe card timekeeping systems at a number of sites. Two sites have been completed with one more in progress – all of which are utilising existing equipment.

Rollout of the entire project was successfully completed in October 2006 and ROCC are providing on-going support and maintenance for the system.

The Benefits
Wendy King, Financial Director at Blooms, tells us that the key benefit this new network has brought is better communication and improved efficiency. The introduction of wireless access in all centres for mobile staff and remote access has enabled people to work from home. This applies to operations managers in particular, who are now able to access emails when out of the office. This in turn has meant a significant gain in efficiency. Also better reporting enables them to consolidate data from the centres more quickly and efficiently. New central email accounts have vastly improved communication and made it far easier to send out circular information to garden centres, garden centre managers or specific key personnel and improved communication throughout the company.

When considering the results the new system has brought Wendy King say’s: “This really was a case of refining, upgrading and securing and was a decision we needed to make. We haven’t look back since the installation of the new system and the outcomes are all positives. ROCC have transformed our networks and improved and organised our file data storage and our server storage areas within Head Office. It has linked all our centres and enabled a free flow of email between the sites and head office.” She added: “We’ve also upgraded our accounting package at the same time and as our daily takings figures are now sent into head office more quickly, this has improved our accounts reporting.”

When asked about working with ROCC Wendy commented: “Dealing with ROCC is very easy. They bridge the gap between the technical side of IT and the business side for us, so I think that’s been the key to the success of this project. We’ve always had a good relationship them and I believe that if you get the right supplier the process needn’t be feared. They understood what we wanted and in the rapidly changing world of IT I anticipate this new system will last us for at least 5 years.”

The Future
Paul Jones:” The next stage for Blooms would be the introduction of local file servers and an Intranet which could host statutory documents and provide freedom of information for staff and managers. Garden centres seem a strange animal for IT and it didn’t really seem to fit in, but it does now and Blooms are making great use of it.”

The final comment from Wendy King was to say that: “Overall growth of the company has increased and that’s the ROI that all business are looking for from their IT investment.”