Richmond Plant Case Study

by | Jul 8, 2019

Simple migration of EPOS and Sage services to cloud hosting

Richmond Plant Hire are a plant hire and tool company based in Nottinghamshire. Established in 2007, they have over 50 years combined experienced helping find the right tools for the job for the building, construction, civil engineering and allied industries.

Managing Director Dave Moore has overseen the rapid growth of the company over the last 8 years. Now based in Mansfield, they can supply virtually anything to the tool hire market.

The Challenge

Richmond Plant hire, due to its expansion in recent years, is split across two main sites – Mansfield and Long Bennington.

The Mansfield depot had an HP Proliant Windows Server hosting the plant hire Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) from Higher Concept –known as Syrinx – and the Sage Accounts package for the company.

The company needed a new system as the server was no longer receiving hardware support from HP, and the Windows Server 2003 Operating System was due to be made obsolete in July 2015.

They needed a solution to the problem whilst their systems were still fully functioning, before a problem developed that couldn’t be fixed and severely impacted on their productivity.

The Mansfield office is connected to the internet using a standard broadband connection and staff at Long Bennington connected to the main systems using remote access.

“Laurence helped us deal with dated and increasingly unreliable systems that were essential to the success of our business across
two offices.

“He was very approachable, listened to our needs, and explained things very well.
“Not only has he helped us streamline our systems, but he has saved us quite a bit of money by helping us to find the right processes and the right suppliers to meet the needs of
the company.”

David Denby, Manager at Richmond Plant Hire

The Solution

To find the best suited solution for Richmond Plant hire, we did the necessary research into their unique situation and presented,two options.

The first was to simply replace the existing server setup. We contacted the relevant hardware and software companies and prepared a full specification and quote.

The second option was to move both the Syrinx and Sage Accounts onto a cloud hosted system. In preparation, we liaised with Higher Concept about speaking to their existing clients who already hosted Syrinx in the cloud. They introduced us to two clients that not only recommended cloud hosting but recommended a reliable hosting company to use – System Host. After Richmond Plant Hire opted for the cloud-based option, we made it as simple as possible for them and liaised with System Host, who set up the new environment with the relevant Syrinx and Sage systems.

We then backed up the systems at the Mansfield depot, and restored them in the cloud.

Finally, we carried out a full test of the system at both Mansfield and Long Bennington to ensure everything worked exactly as planned.Only after that did we roll out the cloud based system and shut down the old services at the Mansfield depot.

The Benefits
• Added safety and security for all systems using cloud-based technology.
• Streamlined access to Syrinx and Sage Accounts from remote offices.
• Significant time and cost savings by reducing maintenance and down-time of old system.
• Minimal down-time during migration of services.