Overview
Founded in 1986, SThree PLC are a global organisation, employing over 3,000 people in 16 countries and providing specialist contract and permanent recruitment services, across ten brands, in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) industries. The health and well-being of SThree’s people is the first and foremost priority and so, when it became unsustainable to continue with people working in the offices all over the world, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in March 2020, the business was quick to make the decision to move to a fully remote, flexible working setup for employees. In order to do this, the IT team needed to quickly mobilise and deploy hundreds of mobile devices with Office 365 and Microsoft Teams to the workforce, moving away from legacy desktops and fixed workstations.
Challenge
Like many companies, flexible working was not something that was completely new to SThree. For businesses all over the world, flexibility has become a huge priority – therefore the leadership team were aware of this and committed to the roll out of a new flexible working initiative, with the aim of providing all employees with a laptop, enabling them to work from anywhere with an internet connection. This roll-out was scheduled to take place over a 3-year period due to the size of the global workforce and office estate. This plan, however, was thrown into fast forward with the onset of coronavirus (COVID-19), meaning the IT team had to rapidly mobilise resources. The main challenge alongside having the team ready to deploy devices was securing stock of approved hardware devices, as huge demand from organisations across the UK and Europe stripped out stock inventories of laptops and most IT equipment.
Solution
Sthree quickly accelerated the rollout of mobile devices to the workforce with over 1400 laptops provisioned and delivered across the UK, Europe, and the USA. NVOY Technologies leveraged their extensive distribution network and established relationships to secure over 600 devices for SThree in less than one week. To secure stocks and speed up delivery NVOY made upfront payments and used same day private courier services to ensure that orders were fulfilled as quickly as possible. This allowed the IT team at SThree to receive the laptop devices quickly and begin builds and deployments to the workforce.
Results
SThree were able to mobilise the workforce incredibly quickly to make the move to home working. Employees were provided with a fully provisioned Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 device, including Office 365 and Teams, to enable the business to continue operations and keep staff safe, whilst continuing to serve candidates and customer without interruption. This has further led to increased employee satisfaction and productivity across the workforce from remote, flexible working.
One of the main challenges we had at the very beginning was sourcing Microsoft Surface Laptops as the devices were in very high demand. I phoned upwards of 80 suppliers to try and find stock. This was a struggle but thanks to NVOY Technologies, we were able to get our hands on the devices we needed. NVOY Technologies, who we work really closely with on a variety of IT projects and sourcing requirements, were able to rapidly secure 600 of the devices, turning around quotations, order processing and delivery in a matter of days, which was a huge assistance for us. This has been an amazing achievement showcasing the power of teamwork and strong partnerships with our trusted suppliers like NVOY Technologies.
