“Kinetics brought a large pool of knowledge across a broad range of companies and markets that assisted us to reduce the time to market of solutions and infrastructure implementations.”
– Truby Gravatt, IT Manager
IT Review
Identifying gaps vs best practice
Jacobsen needed confidence in their IT direction. As a distributor of premium flooring products in a highly competitive industry, IT is crucial to Jacobsen’s – from managing sales and opportunities to tracking shipments, managing HR and forward planning, all aspects of the business are reliant on IT. The business needs to make the right decisions, in a timely manner, to maximise return on investment, reduce risk and empower staff.
Jacobsen’s long time IT Manager was moving on. Jacobsen took this as an opportunity to engage Kinetics Group to do a review of their IT Systems. The board was looking for an independent external evaluation to ensure the business is not exposed to any unnecessary risks as well as recommendations for Jacobsen’s IT Strategy.
Some of the challenges identified were:
- With a single senior IT contact and little documentation, the business was at risk should the IT Manager not be available.
- As a busy IT manager there was little time for R&D into better ways to do things
- Exposure to best practices and industry accepted solutions was lacking
- Due to a full workload, projects were being delayed
The review helped Jacobsen realise that they did not have to do everything themselves – Truby Gravatt, IT Manager says “Kinetics brought a large pool of knowledge across a broad range of companies and markets that assisted us to reduce the time to market of solutions and infrastructure implementations.”
With the help of a Kinetics IT Advisor, Jacobsen has been able to increase the responsiveness of IT across the business. The result of this is an increase in staff satisfaction with IT, with projects being delivered on budget and on time. Monthly IT meetings help keep the business on track with the IT projects and strategy. This has helped get the ‘business as usual’ tasks under control so the team can focus on projects that will make a difference to the business, starting with adopting Microsoft cloud solutions like Office365.
This has given the confidence to the board that they have the right IT strategy going forward.