Specialist recruitment agency
Business A private company supplying engineering support resources to the aviation industry. The company approach involves establishing project teams consisting of specialist and licensed aircraft engineers and technicians who travel to customers' facilities around the world to undertake short and long term contracts. At any one time there can be over 200 engineers working on contracts for a core client base of 30 companies including airlines such as KLM, Malaysian Airline System and Saudi Arabian Airlines. The company maintain a database of over 7,000 engineers at its head office from where all operation, accounting and payroll functions are managed. The existing computer system included a 9-user Unix system running specialist packaged software for the recruitment industry.
Size £6m turnover, 13 employees, 1 location.
Functions Personnel database, payroll, sales invoicing, sales ledger, purchase ledger, nominal ledger.
Project Systems strategy & systems selection 
Issues Old legacy systems - The existing systems were old and could not easily provide the necessary information in a suitable form to facilitate effective management of the business.

Inadequate support - The support being provided by the existing supplier was no longer adequate and management felt that they had lost interest in providing support.

Limited management information - More comprehensive information was required on a prompt basis to control and manage the business and to fulfill performance reporting requirements efficiently.

Integration - A new integrated system was required providing access to the operational, accounting and office productivity facilities from a single PC on each user's desk.

Improved office systems - A new system was required supporting modern office facilities such as e-mail, Internet access, and fax from the desktop.
Outcome The systems vision was defined including the envisaged target systems structure and the likely order of costs to achieve the required system along with recommendations on organisational and operational issues. A specification of requirements in the form of an invitation to tender was issued to a number of potential suppliers and their proposals evaluated. The IT infrastructure was updated to allow support for Microsoft Exchange and Office and the existing specialist packaged software transferred onto the new infrastructure pending delivery of the new windows based e-enabled version of the software. 

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