The Bradleys management team is constantly thinking ahead, with guidance from Pinnacle. Chris says, “Pinnacle has ensured that we never run out of road in terms of IT capacity, so we always have room to grow. They are also our eyes and ears on what’s happening at Sage and brief us well in advance on any developments coming down the line.”
Similarly, Pinnacle has helped to bring new businesses into the Bradleys fold. In addition to organic growth, Bradleys has made three strategic acquisitions while Pinnacle has been its technical support partner.
Chris outlines some of the challenges in integrating the IT infrastructure of these businesses: “In the first of these acquisitions, the workforce relocated to our Ashford premises, which meant adding new users and new email accounts to our network. In a second acquisition, of a company in Sandwich, we brought the incumbent Sage 50 package and users into our set-up and security processes, which required two days of technical effort on Pinnacle’s part. Finally, with our most recent acquisition, signed and sealed just weeks ago, we will be migrating the acquired company’s cloud-based business systems over to Sage.”
Chris observes that handling the technicalities of an acquisition is no mean task: “Pinnacle has given us the tools to manage all these scenarios, which involve integrating new product ranges with our original range of 3,500 products.”
The flexibility offered by server virtualisation technology plays a key role in integrating new companies and expanding resources to meet business demand. Chris says, “The huge benefit of virtualisation is that we can sort out any issues before migrating to a live environment. In the past, it would have been ‘fingers crossed’. Now I can be confident it will work on the day. Pinnacle installed a hypervisor and this allows us to ‘play’ in the background with incorporating our acquired businesses and to experiment with different scenarios.”