Management + Systems

A fire, flood, cyber attack or commercial sabotage are all disasters that no company ever wants to face. However, if the worse were to happen would your company survive?

In 2014, after a fire spread from neighbouring premises, fastener supplier K-Engineering Co Ltd had to deal with just such a disaster. Now three years later the company is fully operational and getting its name back into the market – what was the key? Its business applications were hosted by EDP Plc.

“Our premises were totally destroyed, we lost everything – stock, vehicles, the lot. It was a horrific event that I wouldn’t wish on anybody,” explains Ian Wilkinson, managing director at K-Engineering. “It was two days until the site was safe enough to look inside at the damage. Before the fire we had in excess of GB£1.5 million (€1.8 million) worth of products and after there was literally nothing left. Nothing was salvageable.”

The company was in disaster recovery – but thanks to its business and management systems being hosted by EDP it was able to get the business back up and running reasonably quickly.

“Had we not been hosted I dread to think where we would be now,” says Ian. “The fact that EDP hosted all of our computer systems off-site made an incalculable difference to our dealings with the insurers, as all of our paper records were destroyed. We would have been in deep trouble had we not been hosted, as proving stock holdings, orders placed and other vital information such as outstanding creditors would have been impossible. In the short term we used our Socketfast offices in Redditch as a disaster recovery suite, where we decamped and were able to access our business systems and all the information we needed.”

Ian reveals: “I was sceptical of hosting in the beginning – it’s all well and good seeing a speedy demo on a laptop but the proof is using it working in-situ. I did eat my words though. The first time we saw a huge difference was in running a month end, the old system used to take us 3 to 5 hours – hosted it took between 3 and 5 minutes, I couldn’t believe it.”

The additional bonus for K-Engineering was that it wasn’t responsible for its own systems and servers any more. “I was spending around 50% of my time and sometimes weekends managing our technology rather than doing my ‘real’ job. Plus, we didn’t have to worry about the cost of upgrading servers, no maintenance, no ad-hoc engineer travel or costs. In addition to that we were able to lose the costs previously incurred by using BT Kilo Stream private data lines. It’s been exceptionally good for our business and for my time management.”

Ian adds: “I would seriously advocate considering the hosted option to any merchant or distributor business, based on the valuable disaster recovery benefits. Had we not been hosted we couldn’t have contacted anyone – we had no external phone, all of the customer contact information, telephone numbers, fax numbers, stock and purchasing records, accounts records and sales information were destroyed.”

“We could very easily have been in the position of being reliant upon the honesty of our customers to pay the statements they had received knowing that we would have had nothing to substantiate them with. Similarly with suppliers being honest about what we had purchased – there were just no paper records to refer back to. The company probably wouldn’t be here in this form had we not had our systems hosted.”