3 June 2024
With rapidly rising inflation exacerbating already-existing challenges for the education sector, leasing technology currently appears to be the most cost-effective route.
Legacy to leading-edge: McCambridge Duffy’s digital evolution with Apogee
The Benefits
- Yearly costs associated with postage have reduced from £60,000 to £8,400 – saving the firm over £50,000
- The average monthly costs of £31,000 incurred by outages have now reduced down to zero
- Client caseloads have almost doubled from 5,000 to 9,500 without needing to increase headcount
- A meeting of creditors appointment now takes just 7 days to process, down from 45, an 80% reduction
- 90% of staff are now successfully working remotely or via a hybrid arrangement, leading to retention of key individuals who want flexibility
McCambridge Duffy
McCambridge Duffy is one of the leading insolvency firms in the UK. Established over 80 years ago, the firm has a rich history in helping thousands of people and businesses to eradicate their debt. Made up of a team of 140 staff, it utilises expert technical and case experience to ensure that its clients receive the best outcomes.
With Apogee by the team’s side, McCambridge Duffy has significantly reduced its costs, almost doubled its client caseloads without the need to increase headcount, and retained key individuals with a seamless remote working approach.
The Background
In 2018, the team at McCambridge Duffy were yet to fully embrace digitisation. It was operating with a conservative mindset and existing legacy technology which hindered efficiency, accumulated unnecessary costs and placed barriers in the way of sustainability goals.
Digital transformation was being prevented in two main areas. Firstly, enormous quantities of documents needed to be printed, signed by the relevant parties such as creditors and debtors, and then scanned. In any given year, this could accumulate to over one million pieces of printed paper being produced in the office. Six multifunction printers were working at full capacity to deliver these numbers.
Postage of documents to clients was also expensive, costing the firm approximately £60,000 a year. No system existed that could integrate with its case management platform and devise a streamlined online workflow for a specific document.
The organisation’s second concern was its underlying IT infrastructure, which was lacking the most up-to-date security provisions and failover capabilities. On average, the firm would suffer one to two outages a month, with resulting costs amounting to £31,000 on a monthly basis. Each new service was then allocated to a new SQL Server, incurring unnecessary expenditure.
As a result of these legacy processes and technology deployments, every employee worked in the office at all times, with no option to work from home.
It would be safe to say that there was some resistance in our business to move forward with digitisation in 2018, but the numbers spoke for themselves.
We had a jam-packed lever arch file full of documents for each of our 5000 clients. It was a lot of paper to store and manage.
We were also very much aware that our IT infrastructure, which should have been whirring away in the background, was a hot topic of many board decisions because of its unreliability.
- Michael Rutherford, Business Operations Manager at McCambridge Duffy
The Solution
Apogee set about to digitise the operations at McCambridge Duffy. Its Document Management system was introduced and integrated with the existing case management system, which controls the digital journey of documents from a centralised location. Staff can easily access documents from wherever they are and send forms to different stakeholders to be signed online. With printing requirements drastically reduced, the firm slimmed down its device inventory to just one multifunction printer and four scanners.
Apogee also took over the company's IT infrastructure, under its Managed IT Services agreement. Everything from the user licenses to laptop stands, keyboards and headsets were rolled out, with an expert deployed to manage this process over a three month period.
Following a seamless transition, devices can now be set up within an hour, rather than a few days as was previously.
Additionally, a license per user model reduces the number of new servers needed and lowers the company's costs, while 13 remote desktop servers have been shrunk down to four. The end-to-end management of the IT estate also includes email and spam filtering and domain management, including McCambridge Duffy's nine different brands incorporated under one server estate.
From the beginning of the conversation with McCambridge Duffy, it became clear that we could make significant improvements across the business.
With the help of our professional services team, we sat down with the key decision-makers at the firm and went through the current processes in detail to identify exactly how we could help them.
- Aideen Muldoon, Sales Account Manager at Apogee Corporation
The Outcome
Thanks to the integration of the Document Management system, the whole McCambridge Duffy team were able to shift to remote working following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Where specific documents still needed to be printed, this could be handled by one device. The firm was able to retain a significant segment of its employee base by allowing them to work from home during the height of the pandemic, with minimal impact on productivity and efficiency.
Since then, the additional integration of a stable IT system, creating a full end-to-end provision of Apogee services, has enabled the firm to shift to a long-term policy of remote working. As a result of the flexibility that McCambridge Duffy is able to offer its employees, the firm has been able to retain its talented individuals in a market plagued by skills shortages.
The Future
Looking ahead, Apogee will continue to look after McCambridge Duffy’s IT infrastructure under a Managed Services approach, and is working on incremental improvements. This includes the migration of more of its services to the cloud, including Office 365, to benefit from shared mailboxes and distribution groups, further streamlining tasks.
There is also work in the pipeline to apply safeguards to eradicate the human error from mass communication to clients, helping to maintain compliance with GDPR. In an effort to further increase efficiency, machine learning capabilities are being tested to capture incoming information from documents automatically, increasing the volumes that the firm can deal with.
With remote working processes fully embedded into the organisation’s culture, McCambridge Duffy is in the process of moving to a more modern building to better suit its workforce. Overseeing the office move, Apogee is taking responsibility of all the physical IT infrastructure, including access points, servers, networking and equipment for integration in the new premises. It is also working with a local partner to complete the installation of cabling into the new building.
We've been on a transformative journey over the last five or so years, and I don't think we could have reached this point today had we not cooperated so closely with the Apogee team.
It started with a project to streamline our printing processes and now virtually everything we touch is an Apogee solution.
- Michael Rutherford, Business Operations Manager at McCambridge Duffy
