An Easynet customer for six years, IT underpins James Walker’s organisation. A new five-year contract with Easynet will provide the platform to support the business’ global growth plans and improve customer satisfaction. It will also enable it to deliver the reliability and efficiency of service on which its customers have come to depend.
A dynamic global manufacturing business, James Walker is responsible for supplying a vast range of high performance fluid sealing products and knowledge-based services to almost every sector of the industry. In the UK alone it has 11 production, engineering, distribution and customer support sites and a further 40 across the rest of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South East Asia, South Africa and the USA. From Research and Development and manufacturing, to product application and plant refurbishment, its success hinges on communication, collaboration and effective IT.
As the James Walker business has evolved, the availability of the network and its ability to support the delivery of applications to end-users has become increasingly important. With this in mind Easynet has worked very closely with the James Walker IT team, upgrading the network to ensure it has the capacity and the resilience to support video and data and -in the future - voice, and extending this infrastructure to incorporate new sales offices.
Adrian Wakefield, James Walker’s Business Services Director, said: “If our business critical applications have performance issues, then ultimately we’ll see the impact on the company’s bottom line: our business is about the swift delivery of high performance products, and if this is affected, our customers can be directly affected. Easynet knows our organisation well. Continuing to work closely with them is, for us, one of the most effective ways of minimising this potential impact”.
Adrian Thirkill, Easynet’s UK MD and COO said: “In days of old industry, if a cog stopped turning, a plant couldn’t operate. For today’s manufacturers, applications are virtual cogs, and businesses need them to keep on running. Manufacturing in the digital age is phenomenal, and James Walker is one of the most efficient, IT-driven manufacturers I’ve ever come across”.
A recent survey, Killer Apps 2013, indicated that 83% of manufacturers are experiencing problems when accessing and using IT applications. The CIOs and IT Directors at manufacturing organisations said they had experienced some kind of performance issue with IT applications in the last 12 months. When asked which type of application most frequently suffers performance problems Video-based applications such as Unified Communication ranked highest with 32%, closely followed by ERP and business applications with 31%.
