Better cost management, simplicity, control and multi-vendor support

by Sangeetha | Dec 9, 2019 | IT infrastructure services

Better cost management, simplicity, control and multi-vendor support

In any organisation of any size there’s always a need for some kind of IT incident management and Break Fix process. It’s great if the process you have works, but it’s always worthwhile keeping things under review to see what could be done better.

Do you have a clear picture of what support arrangements you have in place, and what they’re costing you?  Have you had a bad support experience because of lack of internal skills, poor vendor support or unresponsive service providers? Are the people responsible for support sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to diagnose interoperability problems with other product sets? Do you spend an inordinate amount of time chasing your supplier?

These are just some of the difficulties our customers have previously encountered while trying to keep the business running. In our experience, there are five key benefits of moving to a contracted Break Fix service with us instead.

1. Cost reduction and improved cost control

We’ve been providing prompt and reliable Break Fix services for many years, and have discovered that, on average, organisations pay much less – for a better level of service – by contracting Navigator System to manage the process. Our customers report average support cost savings of up to 40 per cent compared with inflated OEM quotes.

When warranties expire it’s often an automatic decision to renew with the original supplier. But by simply taking the opportunity to get comparative quotes, you have the opportunity to dramatically increase the value you get from your spend. It’s a bit like when your annual household or motor insurance comes up for renewal; you can probably get a better deal elsewhere, perhaps with multi-vendor – the IT equivalent of ‘multicar’ cover – thrown in.

2. Consolidated, multi-vendor support

Having a central contracted service desk provides you with a single point of contact with one number to call available up to 24×7. This can substantially reduce Break Fix resolution times. Often a perceived problem – say with underperforming storage, for example – may be caused by something like a network bottleneck. You could be waiting for the storage vendor to get the problem sorted while all the time the issue lies elsewhere.

With a holistic view of the business’s IT we can help spot the underlying problems and get them dealt with much faster – and consequently at lower cost – than by relying on the OEM’s own specialists. We can promptly attend to and resolve issues, often without needing to refer to the original vendor.

And, of course, there’s the commercial advantage. The more software, equipment or cloud service support you include in your contract, the lower the total cost compared with having different agreements with multiple suppliers. It makes support costs easier to manage and far more transparent.

3. Support digital transformation projects

If your business is on a digital transformation journey, whether moving to the cloud or bringing your infrastructure into line with cloud best practices, our Break Fix services with flexible short-term contracts and world class service means you can seamlessly migrate and mitigate any downtime. Our prices free up maintenance budget so you can can invest in technologies that give your organisation a healthier business edge.

We free up in-house teams to concentrate on higher value projects rather than getting perpetually bogged down in keeping the lights on. And if you’re worried about keeping track of cost then our pre-paid credit service, RESPONSE, will let you call off time whenever it’s required. It can even include onsite assistance if you’re struggling to resolve issues with vendors.

4. Optimise legacy infrastructure

We can help you get better control of capital expenses and drive greater ROI by extending IT asset life cycles well beyond OEM End-of-Life (EoL) / End-of-Service-Life (EoSL) declarations, with tailored SLAs that allow optimisation of response and repair requirements for each IT asset.

Our Breakfix provides peace of mind that your existing infrastructure will continue to not only support the business but push it forwards. Our world class services simplify management, tracking and reporting. There’s one service desk, and just one number to call for any issue. We support data centre requirements globally, on- or off-premises, and are able to call upon a network of over 600 highly-trained, full-time field engineers from our vast affiliate network.

We already resell, install, tune and optimise most of the products and software we’re likely to come across, and our engineers are accredited by the OEMs themselves.

5. Better risk and compliance management

Running unsupported vendor technologies can create uncertainty in the state of the IT environment, give rise to security concerns, and make it more difficult to demonstrate compliance. By having a robust Break Fix plan in place, you’re able to address many issues from your IT risk register and achieve much better business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

You can even extend your Navigator contract to include a fully-managed environment, whereby performance is tuned and optimised, and performance/security patches are automatically applied without you having to worry about them.

Avoid the hidden costs of IT Break Fix

When your IT breaks you always pay for the time taken to fix the problem (even if that’s just the cost of in-house resource). If things are delayed, business is interrupted and money is lost.

Although one can’t put a number on the cost of waiting for things to break, we can try to prevent it continually recurring. Some support providers simply provide any kind of fix and if the problem recurs they get the chance to come back and bill you yet again. At Navigator, we simply do a great job. We don’t want to keep revisiting the same problem – and neither should you.

Want to see the proof? Ask to see our customer references.