Clayton Glass were founded in 1956 making them one of the UK’s longest established glass manufacturers. In 2004, the business became privately owned and since have gone from strength to strength. Fast forward to 2021 and Clayton Glass have grown into a much larger business, operating across four separate UK sites, and employing over 400 employees also making them one of the UK’s largest glass manufacturers.
“The partnership between ourselves and Smart IT has developed and grown over the years, at Clayton Glass our ethos is “the Clayton Difference” we believe that the correct way to do business is through building strong relationships, by creating trust through honesty, and having a two-way loyalty gives the customers and suppliers complete piece of mind that we take their business seriously. Smart IT have a very similar ethos which has been key to our successful relationship and ongoing relationship”
Tom Moore, Group Procurement and IT Manager – Clayton Glass
Challenge
Clayton Glass have experienced significant growth over recent years adding pressure on the outdated exchange server, which was often slow and could also be unreliable.
“We have grown significantly as a business as has our reliance on emails. The volume of emails we received was taking its toll on the server resource resulting in everything running noticeably slower over time.
Tom Moore, Group Procurement and IT Manager – Clayton Glass
We chose Smart IT because they are well positioned to help businesses like us and as we have worked with Smart IT for a number of years, we had full confidence in both their ability and knowledge of our infrastructure along with our long-term IT Strategy.”
Solution
The solution was to migrate Clayton Glass from their legacy on-premise server to a cloud-based Microsoft 365 solution with centrally backed up data.
Clayton Glass required a robust email system that offered high availability without the expense of purchasing any new server hardware onsite. The facility to be able to access emails remotely and securely was also an important influencing factor in the decision.
“We knew this was the right investment for Clayton Glass, not only would this solve our speed issues, it also offered us scalability for future expansion. The migration also offered us the added security that comes with moving to the cloud”
Tom Moore, Group Procurement and IT Manager – Clayton Glass
“The number of emails was significantly impacting the Exchange 2016 server’s performance which was then in turn affecting productivity too. Whilst monitoring we identified errors within the database which couldn’t be repaired without significant downtime. After in depth discussions with Clayton Glass, it was agreed that moving to Office 365 was the right option for upgrading their infrastructure and providing a cost-effective solution.”
Shaun Simpson, Technical Director – Smart IT
Results
A fully planned and managed migration was rolled out over a weekend encompassing three UK sites as well as remote workers. The migration was conducted out of hours to ensure no disruption during business hours and no down time. Smart IT migrated Clayton Glass seamlessly to Office 365, resulting in all users are now on the same version of Outlook and Office applications within Office 365. Administration management resource is also reduced, as new users or changes can be done quickly and efficiently, whilst keeping costs low.
During the migration it was discovered that several emails had not been received due to an issue on the old exchange server. This demonstrated that the migration to Office 365 offers a confidence no emails will be undelivered or missed in the future.
“We are extremely pleased with the migration; everything is noticeably quicker. Now that emails are now located in Office 365 our users are now able to access emails in any location, regardless if working remotely or in any of our offices.
Tom Moore, Group Procurement and IT Manager – Clayton Glass
This has not only benefited our own operations but also gives us the additional reassurance that we are no longer at risk of missing valuable customer emails.”
As part of the migration, access to Microsoft Teams was included, each device was configured to allow collaboration between sites, remote workers, and customers.
“Teams has proven to be a very successful way of keeping the communication channels open with employees, customers and suppliers alike, keeping our relationships as strong as ever. We will certainly carry on using teams in the future too”
Tom Moore, Group Procurement and IT Manage – Clayton Glass
Recommendations
“Coming from a corporate background, I have worked with large internal IT departments and I have honestly found the service levels at Smart IT far superior. The response and resolution times far exceeds expectations.”
Tom Moore, Group Procurement and IT Manager – Clayton Glass
The project was well managed, right from the project initiation meeting through to completion to the ongoing support. I felt like the Smart IT engineers were part of the Clayton Glass team not a third party”
For information how Smart IT can help with your IT Systems contact us today.
