PIP Electrics and Building Services
Established in 1969, PIP Electrics and Building Services has since grown into a £90M business which delivers electrical and mechanical installations to commerce and industry.
The client
Established in 1969, PIP Electrics and Building Services has since grown into a £90M business which delivers electrical and mechanical installations to commerce and industry.
PIP manages all aspects of mechanical and electrical engineering, from design and installation to testing, commissioning, and project completion. Specialising in commercial fit-outs, they operate across a wide range of sectors.
With 100+ members of staff, PIP operates from two offices, with a HQ in Essex and their London office in Canary Wharf.
The challenge
PIP’s existing IT infrastructure was heavily reliant on a legacy MS Exchange server, which posed significant challenges in terms of scalability, collaboration, and security. As the company expanded, there was a pressing need to migrate to a more flexible and secure platform. The goal was to transition to Microsoft 365, leveraging SharePoint and Teams for collaboration and improved data management.
However, the scale of the migration presented several complexities. The migration needed to address several key challenges:
- A large significant portion of data that required careful migration, restructuring, to enhance and optimise for a SharePoint environment.
- Ensuring that employees, particularly those less familiar with cloud technologies, could adopt new tools without significant resistance.
- Providing ongoing support and training to ensure that PIP’s internal IT team was equipped to manage the new system and guide the wider organisation through the transition.
The solution
Arc partnered with PIP to provide a tailored, phased migration strategy that would minimise disruption and ensure long-term success. Drawing on our experience with similar projects, we began with a comprehensive assessment of PIP’s existing IT infrastructure to build a detailed migration plan that addressed both immediate and future needs.
We worked with select users from each department to understand their needs, capture how they work and then respond accordingly; once they were happy with the solution, we then proceeded to the migration. Whilst this meant that the solution supported their internal workflows, it also ensured that the research group were also able to act as champions for the solution migration within their respective teams to support their colleagues in addition to Arc’s support.
We first moved PIP from their on-premise Exchange solution to Microsoft 365, focusing on transitioning their email and communication platforms to the cloud. During this process, we discovered a previously unknown issue when installing O365 that prevented the upgrade on one of the remote desktop servers; we replaced the virtual server and added additional virtual server to improve the overall performance.
Also central to this phase was the introduction of Microsoft Teams, which we integrated to facilitate better collaboration between PIP’s multi-site teams. Understanding that user adoption could be a challenge, we worked closely with PIP’s IT team to ensure a smooth transition. We provided training to empower them with the knowledge and tools to support the migration internally.
Post migration, our team were onsite for the MFA device configuration, which was assist the new MFA application to PIP’s staff, just to ensure that any questions or queries could be demoed in person.
“Arc’s support throughout this migration has been invaluable”
Tom Hawes, IT Manager at PIP
The results
The successful migration to Microsoft 365 has provided PIP with a secure, flexible, and scalable IT environment, with a phased approach that ensured minimal disruption.
Tom Hawes, IT Manager at PIP, said: “Arc’s support throughout this migration has been invaluable. Their phased approach allowed us to make a seamless transition to the cloud, and the training and ongoing assistance ensured that our team could confidently embrace the change. We now have an IT infrastructure that will support our future growth.”
Following the successful completion of Phase 1 we are now currently working with the client and are in the early planning stages of a Phase 2 which would see a full migration to SharePoint for PIP’s document management and data storage needs. This phase is focused on helping PIP centralise and streamline their data processes, ultimately enhancing collaboration and improving access to information across the business.
