The most important resource for the Swedish auditing firm Sporrong & Eriksson Revisionsbyrå AB is its own employees. They guarantee the more than 600 small and medium-sized business customers personal, tailored interaction at all times. This is achieved by performing much of their work outside the office,
on customer premises, which requires highly developed remote work solutions that meet the highest standards of security.
Using the possibilities digitalisation provides in the service of their customers has been a key goal for Sporrong & Eriksson from early on, winning the firm the ‘Future Agency of the Year’ award in 2017. Together with Konica Minolta, the company decided to take a new, bold step on the path towards becoming truly digital.
For a business whose single product is its employees’ time, the IT solution enabling this has to work seamlessly and be absolutely reliable. At the same time, due to the sensitive and confidential nature of the data they process, this solution needs to ensure the highest levels of data security.
IT SECURITY — REMOTE AGILE WORKING
IT enabling remote work is therefore not just ‘nice to have’ for Sporrong & Eriksson, but a vital factor for its business model. Håkan Sporrong, one of the firm’s four owners, explains, ‘Both our own and our clients’ time is very valuable, so we needed a system that supported how we work. We needed to be agile, but at the same time heavily protected.’
Having been a dedicated and trusted long-term partner of Sporrong & Eriksson since 2011, Konica Minolta first provided a deep analysis and consultation for finding the best-suited solution to take this next step in its partner’s digitalisation process. The previous on-premises solution did not live up to Sporrong & Eriksson’s expectations anymore.
CHALLENGE
- Establishment of a new IT infrastructure that meets the highest security and reliability requirements
- At the same time, it should enable remote work with seamless access to a high number of dedicated, specialist auditing applications
- Unburdening the team of administrative IT tasks and increasing efficiency
REMOTE WORK
Work away from the company premises
Work that company employees do outside of the office, for example at home, outdoors or at a customer, is known as remote work.
They were looking for an IT system that is always up to date – from server to workstations – with the highest level of security and 24/7 reliability. At the same time, this solution should relieve internal resources as best as possible from any IT tasks.
DIGITALISATION DOES NOT WORK IN AN ANALOGUE WAY
In the past, Sporrong & Eriksson staff had to manually perform
backups after working hours. With regard to optimised work processes, when working from outside the office with customer data, Sporrong & Eriksson employees first needed to check out the relevant files from the local system and then afterwards check them back in again.
This process made teamwork on these documents highly difficult and cumbersome, particularly from different locations. Last but not least, Sporrong & Eriksson was also looking for a partner to provide external help desk support and new workstation equipment.
To meet these requirements, Konica Minolta identified the implementation of its one-stop solution Remote Care Workplace Premium as the perfect fit. At the back end, the servers now run from Konica Minolta’s high-security data centre, ensuring maximum reliability and access from anywhere. Backups are now performed automatically and periodically, minimising the threat of any data loss and relieving the firm’s staff of this arduous, repetitive – and non-billable – task.
Antivirus protection is also at the highest level and always up to date. New laptops were provided for the employees, with Konica Minolta ensuring that operating systems and applications always run with the latest versions.
Furthermore, this package includes a 24/7 help desk with experienced Konica Minolta experts always ready to provide support and quickly resolve any issue that may arise. Ultimately, the goal was for Konica Minolta to take over the role of the firm’s external IT department.
HÅKAN SPORRONG, ONE OF THE FIRM’S FOUR OWNERS, EXPLAINS:
‘Both our own and our clients’ time is very valuable, so we needed a system that supported how we work. We needed to be agile, but at the same time heavily protected.’
NON-STOP CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
For Sporrong & Eriksson, it was absolutely crucial for its employees to be able to continue their work for their demanding customers without interruption despite the migration to the new system. In addition, as an auditing firm, the company works with a number of highly industry-specific applications. Konica Minolta had to ensure that they would integrate seamlessly into the new IT system and provide all the remote work capabilities required of them.
Konica Minolta’s experts’ high dedication, commitment and expertise were crucial for turning this project into a success. ‘The service people who ran the implementation were very professional and we felt that they were highly skilled. Whenever there were issues or problems, Konica Minolta handled them quickly and with great respect for the process,’ Håkan Sporrong explains. He is highly satisfied with the result and Konica Minolta’s support, ‘Now, it doesn’t matter if we’re at our office, at home or at the clients. We have the same possibility to access all of the programmes, files and applications that we need to do our job. We are very happy with the service that Konica Minolta delivers.’
Implementing Remote Care Workplace Premium has thereby helped Sporrong & Eriksson make a big leap forward in turning their bold vision for digitalising their business into reality. And it doesn’t stop here: future projects together with Konica Minolta for achieving a truly paperless office and workflows with the customers, for example, are already underway.