The Door Store’s journey to the Cloud began in 2013 when Xperience Group were appointed as its strategic IT Partner. As the UK and Ireland’s largest stockist of doors and floors, the business has been growing from strength to strength. Therefore, the need for resilient IT is more important than ever. Even though its core offering is traditional floors & doors, The Door Store’s operations are nothing shy of future-ready.
Stuart Annesley, Operations Manager at The Door Store comments: “Looking back, we always thought of ourselves as a very traditional company, where traditional on-premise IT fitted the bill and really did everything what we needed it to do.”
Back in 2013, The Door Store made the decision to move to Microsoft Dynamics NAV to manage their financials and operations with the help of Xperience Dynamics, an Xperience Group business. To support this implementation, Xperience Group deployed new cloud servers and installed new computers across the company as well as POS facilities into the company’s two Belfast stores.
Stuart notes: “As a business, we had survived the 2008/9 financial crash. We cut costs, focused on our core business objectives and strived to deliver excellent customer service. It worked, things started to climb. Moving to Microsoft Dynamics NAV was the first part of our journey – to streamline sales processes and improve reporting to make smart data-driven decisions. We knew that if we were to continue growing, we would need to have an IT environment which would allow us to do so.”
The team at Xperience Group work strategically with clients, to create an IT journey (road-map) that will grow as their business does. For The Door Store, the team began exploring new avenues which would take the businesses’ IT even further. The possibilities that Cloud could offer the Door Store were not to be over-looked. With accessibility and multi-location reliance as key motivators the company transitioned to Cloud in 2016 as part of their strategic growth plans.
“The reliability of having on-premise tin was worrying. Our IT set-up at this time meant that, if one site went down, they all would, we had no plan B. Patrick and Richard from Xperience advised that moving to the Cloud would allow us to have one central location which would give us more resilience should any problems arise,” says Stuart.
Connectivity challenges haven’t hindered their journey to the Cloud either. Stuart comments: “Connectivity is excellent. We have BT Net circuits in our Boucher and Reading Stores. Even with Standard Fibre in our Abbey centre store, it hasn’t got in the way of our IT!”
“When you’re in the Cloud, it’s like coming in and turning the lights on, everything’s always on and it always works. It’s as simple as that.”
Since go-live, The Door Store have gone from strength to strength. Their new Cloud solution has facilitated anytime, anywhere access, added additional layers of security and resilience and not to mention, enabled the company to expand its operations into new locations.
Since migrating to the Cloud, The Door Store have opened another store in Reading and have further plans to continue expanding its operations. Stuart remark: “With the flexibility of the Cloud, opening a new store was pain-free, a quick call to Xperience Group and they were able to take care of it.”
It doesn’t stop there, staff have the flexibility to access files through Remote Desktop, anytime, anywhere in the world, on any device. Stuart adds, “No matter where I am, I can dial into my remote desktop and access everything I need. Before the Cloud, there were times when I was on business in China and unable to fix problems until I returned. Now I can log in anywhere and do it instantly.”
The ‘Xperience’ So Far…“We’ve been with Xperience Group for a number of years now and everything is going well. Having quarterly reviews with our Account Manager, Gareth, allows us to look at all of our support hours in line with our contract. It’s great because we have full transparency and know what to expect!”
