About London Fittings and Flanges (LFF)
LLF was formed in 1983 to supply the piping requirements of the petrochemical and gas industries. Three decades of steady growth has seen the group expand to a £50million annual turnover. Multi-site data communication is vital to the company with a head office at Laindon, Essex, warehouses in Scotland, Teeside and Cheshire and supply bases in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and more recently in the US.
Business Situation
LFF has a small but efficient IT department led by Finance & IT Director Steve Frost - himself a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. As well as more than 100 PC users companywide the department has under its care 17 production servers, all running Microsoft Operating systems.
These include Microsoft Exchange Servers, Microsoft SQL Servers, a Terminal Server and ISA Servers overseeing Firewall & VPN connections. The sheer size of the IT requirements means there are a number of occasions when LFF requires outside support from Objective.
Solution
Objective has the skills and expertise to deliver network and server support for multi-site, multi-server companies such as LFF, and has done so successfully for this client since 2004.
The benefits of using Objective, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, have been reduced administration overheads, cover for IT staff holidays, and ease of migration and cross-transfer of skills.
The team’s up-to-date knowledge of new products means it is able to make confident recommendations on technologies and new products that will meet LFF’s needs.
Objective’s support is provided both remotely and on site. Whenever solutions cannot be found by the in-house IT team , Objective’s Systems Consultants are very accessible and can be on hand to double-check solutions or offer the additional skills and resources in getting complex problems resolved.
During the past couple of years Objective has worked with LFF on the replacement of out-of-warranty servers and the upgrade of servers to the Windows 2008 operating system, the Exchange 2007 messaging system and the Windows Hyper- V virtual server.