MB Digital supplies, services and maintains a wide variety of workplace equipment from its base in Kendal, Cumbria. The company, in its current form, has been in operation since 2011 and serves a primarily local customer base.
From its inception, MB decided that it needed to deploy a service management solution and opted for 2serv, a product which the company’s owners knew would perform the tasks that were required of it at that time. However, moving the clock forward by several years, it became clear that the needs of the business had evolved. The company needed more from its service management tool, particularly in the area of mobile operation and how it managed its network of engineers. After careful consideration of the available options, MB decided that Asolvi’s Vantage Online was the best solution for its requirements. By this stage, in late 2019, both 2serv and Vantage Online were part of the Asolvi stable. This meant that Asolvi had expertise and experience with both products and would make the process of migration easier.
When it came to looking at the data that was to be migrated, MB realised that it was a good opportunity to rationalise their data and also to revise some processes that had not changed in many years. While the data migration itself went through quickly and easily, Sara Batty from MB points out that “The more work you put in in advance, the better. It is a good exercise to go through and think about how and why things are done”.
The test data migration was duly completed and MB started their training on Vantage Online in February 2020 and went live with the system in mid-March. With the pandemic hitting very shortly afterwards, this timing had a number of effects. Most importantly, as Vantage Online is a cloud-based solution, remote working was made much easier for the entire MB Digital team. Secondly, it has also given the team time to explore the new solution. As Sara Batty says: “The result has been very positive. Firstly, there are no more paper copies of invoices, orders etc floating around the office. Processes have improved and everything is just so much more visible than it was before."
While moving to a full SaaS solution just before the pandemic was fortuitous, Covid has, unfortunately, slightly stalled any exploration of aspects of Vantage Online that MB has yet to use. As Sara says. “We need to first find our feet and then we can decide where we go next”. Despite these circumstances beyond their control, the experience of moving from 2serv to Vantage Online has been very positive for MB Digital. As Sara Batty succinctly concludes. “We like where we are!”.
