solstice project management ltd

office move

Probably the most underestimated project within an organisation is the ‘office move’ (we prefer to call it ‘Business Relocation’).

There is nothing more damaging to your business if Clients are not able to contact you or staff not being able to serve them, yet the responsibility for the business relocation is either abdicated to a junior member of staff or to the person who will have to do this over and above their ‘day job’.

To add insult to injury senior management is frequently more interested in the desk layouts and colour schemes rather than how the connectivity is going to be maintained or security systems kept intact.

Come and talk to us if this sounds all too familiar. We have experience in managing all the different aspects involved in a business relocation including:-

Tenancy Contract Negotiation
Fit-Out Contract Set-Up and Management
Mechanical & Electrical Fit-Out

HVAC
Small Power Distribution
Data Cabling

IT Networks & Telephony

PSTN Lines / SIP Trunks / Number Diverts
Point-to-Point Circuits
WAN & LAN Architecture

Server Infrastructure

Relocation
Virtualisation
Co-Location

data centre migration

Most organisations cannot afford significant outages for their business critical applications and services (otherwise they wouldn’t be business critical). Therefore, if Data Centre Migrations aren’t planned well, the impact on a business can be devastating.

It is therefore vital that the ‘what-if’ scenarios are identified and analysed at the start of the project to determine the steps required to mitigate risk.

To facilitate this process, it can be invaluable to seek external assistance from someone who has done it before and has a structured, pragmatic approach to risk assessment and project scope development.

If you would like to find out some of the potential pitfalls and ways to mitigate some of the common risks, then contact us so we can get you moving in the right direction.

supplier selection

Selecting a supplier for a product or service is easy. However, selecting the right supplier is harder. We’ve managed a large number of supplier selection processes on behalf of our clients and in our experience, it is vital to answer a couple of pertinent questions at the start of the exercise:-

What are the important characteristics of the product/service that will add value to your business? These need to be defined and quantified. It is also extremely useful to define those characteristics that are ‘nice to have’, as this will help you choose between suppliers later on in the process.
How will you know that the product/service is delivering the required added value? These success criteria, together with the measuring processes, also need to be defined and quantified. It will be vital to include this information in the subsequent contract with the selected supplier.

If you need some help in answering some of the above questions or would like just like to understand the typical steps in a Supplier Selection exercise, then please contact us as we’d be more than happy to help.

IT cost optimisation

“The FD has already claimed a 20% cost saving in my budget for next year, yet I need to deliver more projects just to ‘keep the lights on’.”?

“How many staff do my competitors employ in their helpdesk and what levels of discount are they achieving with their suppliers”?

If you are responsible for a £1million plus budget and these are the types of questions you are struggling with at the moment, then experience tells us that our ‘IT Cost Optimisation Package’ will be of interest to you.

We are offering a service that allows you to uncover potential cost savings and to benchmark your IT expenditure with your peers. After we have completed the exercise you will know how and where savings can be made. Furthermore you will be able to present with confidence to the board that the targeted expenditure within your area is ‘lean and mean’ and that any further cost cutting would either mean a change in service levels or will require enabling investments.

9 times out of 10 we find savings that can be realised with immediate effect without spending a penny. After our analysis we present the results by identifying the potential size of the savings, the time it would take to materialise these and how complicated it would be to implement them. The level of complexity will take into account the risks associated, the upfront investment required and the potential impact on other areas within the business.

“We run a very lean organisation and always negotiate all our contracts; I doubt you are going to find any further savings”. This was the sentiment within one of our Clients before we started our 6 week exercise. Indeed they had achieved some excellent deals on mobile telephony and hardware procurement, but on a £12 million budget we managed to find £400k undisputable first year savings without the need for capital investment and a further £750k for some more challenging savings opportunities. More detailed case studies are available on request.

Call us and ask about our unique Money Back Guarantee. We're so confident of being able to add value to your business that we offer all of our Clients a refund if we do not identify a pre-agreed level of savings.

process engineering

As we identified under Supplier Selections above, knowing the characteristics of a product or system that are key to delivering a successful project is vital. As is the case with most sectors, to do this in the Process Engineering arena, you need to have the relevant experience.

Our Project Managers have years of experience in delivering successful projects in the following areas:-

Utilities

Refrigeration
Steam Raising
Process Gas Handling
Water Treatment
Effluent Processing

Process Plant

Automation

Functional Specification Development
Simulation & Testing
Plant Commissioning

P&ID Development

If you would like to found out more on how we’ve helped a number of blue chip companies deliver successful projects over the years, then please get in touch.

IT infrastructure

Over the years, our Project Managers have not only worked for our clients, but have also worked on behalf of Solution Providers. We combine this experience with our knowledge of the necessary ingredients to manage successful IT projects and a solid technical understanding of the technologies to be applied.

This winning mixture is applied to the following type of projects:

Management of the implementation / upgrade of Wide and Local Area Networks
Implementation of IP telephony systems
Enterprise Server and Storage Infrastructure implementation / upgrades
Web Site Infrastructure Upgrades
Desktop refresh / rollout programmes
Business Continuity and DR assessment, implementation and documentation

audits

Whilst all good manufacturing organisations strive for continuous improvement, it is often difficult to identify potential opportunities to reduce cost, improve quality and reduce the risks to product and personnel without being completely objective.

We have been engaged by a number of World-Class Manufacturing organisations to provide this objectivity. We have developed a thorough, yet pragmatic approach to these assessments, the output of which is a detailed report and a prioritised action list for the Client’s Management Team.

Look at the following case study for more information and afterwards, you would like to know more, then please contact us.