Healthcare Locums

Legacy Systems drive ISC managed services solution

Background

A specialist recruitment consultancy for healthcare staff, Healthcare Locums (HCL) has offices in Loughton, central London, Birmingham and Skipton. Formed in 2003 to supply high-quality staff to the UK's health and social care industry, the firm is committed to redefining standards in its sector, its aim from the outset to place top professionals in the best positions as efficiently as possible.

To this end, HCL provides its clients with health and care professionals in a range of capacities as required; short-term, long-term, permanent, temporary, locum or as contract professionals.

The approach is working. Turnover projections exceed £140million, making HCL the market leader in its three key sectors of AHP, Doctors and Social Care.

HCL’s rapid growth may be attributed to two factors: by doing the simple things well; and by doing them innovatively. The first is evidenced by a flexible, consultative approach to answering client’s needs with the very best professionals; the second by way of a bespoke My Workforce recruitment system, which has created a highly efficient way to deliver staff of all grades and specialities to both the National Health Service (NHS) and the private medical sector.

Requirement

Building unrivalled senior, middle-management and recruitment teams, the company has achieved rapid expansion through business acquisitions. It was inevitable, however, that fuelling corporate growth in this way would create its own issues, particularly for HCL’s IT function. Not least was that of how best to deal with the various legacy environments which accompanied the 2006 acquisitions.

With ISC as preferred solutions developer, an independent consultant was instructed to co-ordinate HCL business users and bring together an array of disparate front-office systems. As other issues emerged from the mass of inherited infrastructures, this joint role expanded to incorporate a strategy review for IT in general.

“In considering a new front-office application, it was clear that HCL’s basic IT infrastructure was suffering from the acquisitions,” explains Luke Harding, HCL’s Group IT Manager. “Quite simply it was not delivering the basic services that HCL required. This came to a head when email problems surfaced during summer 2006, the resolution of which necessitated a fundamental new approach to the IT infrastructure.”

Rather than attempt this internally with an ever-stretched IT team, senior HCL management decided to look at outsourcing crucial IT support. A partner was sought that could rapidly respond to the imminent needs of the company, could offer the appropriate technical skills, and would deliver a scalable solution that would eliminate all current and future acquisition-driven IT problems.

Of the final short-listed group of candidates, HCL felt ISC gave the most credible presentation. “Its tendering team answered questions honestly and creatively, and were able to instill in HCL the confidence that they would find the right answers,” he observes. “ISC was also potentially the most cost-effective.”

Solution

For the management of HCL’s infrastructure – consisting, post-acquisitions, of 300 staff and 15 servers running Office, Topaz, Merit, My Workforce, Voyager and Exchange, spread over nationwide UK sites from Surrey to Glasgow – ISC recommended Citrix as the safest, easiest and most accessible software platform. It was a solution designed to optimise HCL’s investment in IT by reducing costs without any deterioration in service quality.

The ISC-Citrix solution was delivered in two stages: an initial phase to deal with the email problems, followed by the full solution which would move all users onto the recommended Citrix platform.

The email phase was implemented over a period of four weeks, using three weekends to move all users onto a new Exchange platform. For the Citrix stage, the Loughton and outlying offices were also transitioned over three weekends, with teams from ISC and HCL working together to ensure the project’s smooth running. Despite a few minor unexpected issues, the skills and flexibility of the ISC team were crucial factors in a highly-successful migration.

Benefits 

The ISC-Citrix solution is fully scalable – an important consideration given the acquisitive nature of HCL’s growth. It has also added a powerful data security element, which is vitally important to the recruitment industry. And in the central hosting we have provided a new infrastructure to replace the diverse and inconsistent environment operated by HCL prior to our implementation.

The benefits for HCL are manifold:

• Significantly reduced overheads
• Improved service quality
• Enhanced end-user perception and productivity
• Pro-active service management 
• Exceptional data security

The future 

It is expected that, over time, HCL will enjoy a simplified hardware and network environment and thus a more stable and effective IT infrastructure. The healthcare market is about perpetual change; to succeed in this challenging sector takes vision, responsiveness and a diversity of high-margin services with a low cost base.

With these attributes at its heart, HCL is confident of achieving further success. Crucial to this is an ISC-Citrix solution which provides the expandibility of a single email domain that’s accessible from anywhere; ironclad data security; ease and availability of support; and outstanding disaster recovery functions.

“The partner had to be committed to developing over time a managed services relationship that would constantly provide the client with the latest versions of its software while saving on upgrade projects, substantial capital expenditure, large IT teams and physical space. ISC were able to instill in HCL the confidence that they would find the right answers.”

Luke Harding, Group IT Manager, HCL plc.