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Background
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A Luton based Law firm practice,
whilst an old established
firm of over 250 years has always prided itself on its forward
thinking. It was this forward thinking that prompted it’s newly
recruited practice manager to review all
their working practices
looking for workflow efficiencies and how best to organise their
business to take full advantage of the recent changes in restrictive practices for law firms.
“We
had a number of challenging issues to confront, I had identified that
a lot of our processes were very labour intensive. Also as we did not
have a reliable and responsive network infrastructure,
consequently a lot of our secretaries were duplicating work especially
across 3 independent practices that we have.
I
quickly identified that our present IT infrastructure wasn’t adequate
for us to achieve the efficiencies that were so desperately needed and
consequently I looked around for an IT
company who I felt
I could work with to realise this vision
- this where I called in
eps.
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Vision
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We needed to resolve a number of issues:
- Reduce duplication of efforts whether
this was locally or from site to site.
- Improve case file management by implementing
a case management
- System & process that could also create
automated time management facilities & work across remote sites.
- Coordinate files with a diary system
so that you never miss another important deadline.
- Improve efficiencies of the Accounts
Team by cutting down on having to duplicate entries, hunt through
paper files, chase up time sheets etc..
Create a web presence for the practice that demonstrates their facilities
and allows them to market and promote the right image.
- Give all desktop users’ access to the
internet, and also improve communications between remote sites by
installing Broadband facilities. This in turn would allow information
to be freely and easily communicated between staff at all 3 sites.
This also applies to documents files and centralized/ updating of
all IT based facilities such as Legal Forms.
- Centralising distribution of business
critical forms and documents, ensuring that they are centrally backed
up.
By improving efficiencies,
become cost effective
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ultimately
improving the bottom line.
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The Future
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As a start, the changes that have been implemented
by eps have made a dramatic change
to how we work. We do realise though that what has been accomplished
is really only a base to move forward and continue improving our efficiency
and productivity and to continue our quest in offering ever better services
to our clients. To this end we have a continuing plan for improvement
to our overall infrastructure which includes the following:
- Installation of a second exchange mail
server at our second largest site to improve mail efficiency and add
resilience to the mail infrastructure.
- Replace the oldest of our 3 servers
at the smallest site
- Continue the replacement of older Windows
98 PC’s with newer systems that run Win XP across all three sites.
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Implementation
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eps were
able to offer a number of solutions to fit in with the issues I needed
to resolve. I really needed a managed service which
eps specialise in, this would allow
me to offload this time intensive task and allow me to focus on other
issues.
eps offered the following solutions tailored to our requirements
such as,
- Pre-paid support
- Helpdesk support
- Network & infrastructure installation
- Fixed PC install price
- Remote server and desktop support
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Wide Area Network
(WAN) Solution
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| To provide
shared applications and improve inter company communication channels
eps installed a WAN solution between
our 3 sites. |
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Diagram showing how the
one network solution across
3 sites was created.
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