Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation

Established in 1974, the Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation (YPO) provides a professional and cost effective purchasing and supply service to local authority customers from across the UK.

The largest formally constituted local authority purchasing consortium in the UK; YPO is governed by a Management Committee of elected representatives from constituent authorities. At present, there are 13 members including Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council, Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, North Yorkshire County Council and St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council.

Free of subsidy from any member authority, YPO is self-supporting and operates on a commercial basis.

Over the years, the organisation has developed into a highly efficient and commercially orientated public concern, with an annual turnover in the region of £200 million. Today, like many organisations, it relies heavily on its IT infrastructure.

YPO initially contacted Phoenix for technical consultancy advice, as it was becoming increasingly evident to them that their current office support systems were due for some modernisation. Following extensive investigation, it was recommended by the Phoenix Consultancy Team that YPO standardise on to one operating system. As YPO was already using Exchange Server as its email system, the decision was taken to migrate to Windows 2000.

Following the successful realisation of this migration, YPO then approached Phoenix in order to extend their IT capability, without significantly increasing their support overhead.

"Although we already had a good standard of technical support within our own IT team," said Alan Wakenshaw, Computer Officer for YPO, "we did need to extend this level of support, without investing heavily in additional resource. Tapping into Phoenix's pool of experience and knowledge of industry 'best practice' seemed the perfect solution."

The Challenge

The challenge for Phoenix, therefore, was to provide server based support to the whole of the YPO IT operation, complementing and enhancing the existing skills within YPO's own IT staff, based in Wakefield. As the IT operation had previously supported a mixed Novell NetWare and NT environment the newly trained IT staff were keen to work with an experienced partner to help them overcome the changes.

Existing Systems

Following the earlier migration to Windows 2000, YPO are essentially running:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Servers
• Exchange 2000 Server
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Microsoft Office 97 and 2000
• Microsoft ISA Server

In addition to this, Phoenix established a data protection solution incorporating Computer Associates' ARCserve 2000 and a security protection solution using Norton AntiVirus.

The Phoenix Solution

At Phoenix we provide a comprehensive range of software support contracts for Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and NetWare 3.x, 4.x and 5.x. This support can be purchased from us in three ways, enabling customers to buy as little or as much support as they require:

Incident Based
This flexible and controlled programme provides technical personnel with telephone support and the option to escalate to a specialised systems engineer. Offered on a pre-purchase basis, customers buy the number of incidents most appropriate to their needs.

Server Based
Providing telephone and remote access support, with no limit to the amount of calls you make and priority access to support in the event of a server failure, our server based support programme offers a viable and cost effective way of outsourcing your technical help desk. If a problem cannot be solved remotely, the terms of the contract provide a preferred on site support rate.

Desktop Support
The ideal way to cost effectively outsource your end user help desk. Our desktop support programme provides telephone support for most application software with no limit to the number of incidents.

YPO chose our Server Based Support Contract as it best suited their own particular needs. Before the contract commenced, a highly qualified Phoenix consultant carried out a full server assessment to ensure that all systems were configured correctly. As part of the service offered by this particular support contract, quarterly server health checks are also carried out by remote access. Full reports are provided by Phoenix, on a free of charge basis.

The Benefits

The benefits to YPO are such that they can speedily resolve any unknown problems that arise by utilising Phoenix's experience, instead of spending unnecessary time working through possible fixes. There is also the added comfort of knowing that remote dial-in could be utilised if necessary, giving Phoenix hands-on access for the diagnosis of faults.

In addition to this, the remote dial-in facility is used by Phoenix to carry out regular health checks, to proactively ensure that the servers are running efficiently and potential problems are identified in the very early stages. By purchasing a Phoenix Server Support Contract, therefore, YPO has been able to increase the level of support given to their IT operation, thereby maximising the organisation's productivity without significantly increasing support costs.

Furthermore, with reports available from Phoenix, detailing the areas where most support has been needed, YPO has been able to identify weaknesses within their internal systems and allocate resources accordingly.

Also, YPO's IT staff have accelerated their learning process by being able to find quick, concise ways of achieving fixes, thereby constantly improving their overall IT knowledge and understanding.

Alan Wakenshaw concluded: "Expert support of our operating systems and applications has given us the peace of mind we were looking for, especially as the Phoenix engineers have full knowledge and understanding of all our internal systems.

"Our whole IT operation is far more efficient, leaving us to get on with the day-to-day business of running the YPO, safe in the knowledge that we have highly trained engineers available to us should we need them."