The concept of the mobile sales force using laptops and being in constant touch with head office has been much discussed, but rarely implemented. As one of the largest financial advice providers, WIFAS determined to offer this facility to its field staff as soon as practicable to give them a reliable, country-wide service.

WIFAS gets the MIDAS touch

WIFAS (Woolwich Independent Financial Adviser Services) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Woolwich Bank. Established eight years ago to offer high-quality independent advice on financial service products, such as mortgages, investment portfolios and savings, , the company has grown rapidly, and is now one of the UK's largest firms of IFAs (Independent Financial Advisers).

IFAs are subject to stringent regulations about the conduct of their business by the Financial Services Authority, which requires an extremely highly detailed level of documentation around each interview or transaction. As a result, companies like WIFAS find themselves having to keep images of huge volumes of documentation and face the double problems of ever-increasing storage, plus a need to offer immediate access to its staff.

WIFAS transacts all its business with customers through its team of IFAs. To help their advisors make the best possible use of their time, the company is keen to aid mobile working and make administrative tasks as easy as possible.

However, as Derick Simms WIFAS' IT manager points out, rather than the existing IT infrastructure supporting this aim, it was actually hindering it. "We used a system that demanded that IFAs went in to either a Woolwich branch, or their nearest WIFAS office just to download e-mail. Sometimes they would make a thirty mile round trip only to find there was no e-mail for them. They had laptops and mobile phones, but the laptops were completely stand-alone with no network connectivity."

Derick suggested that the IFAs' productivity could be dramatically improved by taking a wholly new approach to the way that WIFAS managed its data and infrastructure. He proposed migrating to a thin client environment, with all data centralised in the company's data centre and backed up for disaster recovery.

"Not only is it a very simple solution, it slashes operational costs - the clients only have NT4 and Citrix installed so there are no application support issues, and we can fix over 90% of problems remotely. Also, as no data is held locally, and the data centre is supported by a resilient disaster recovery solution provided by Computacenter, even a major building outage will not affect its ability to deliver data to anyone who needs it. Another major advantage is that our bandwidth needs are slashed - all that is being transmitted are keystrokes and images, so our networking costs are dramatically reduced."

Dawn Johnson, Head of I.F.A Operations, immediately saw the benefits to the staff in the field and gave the project, by now codenamed MIDAS, her full support. "It was a huge technological change, but it gave us the chance to give our advisers real time links to the IT systems we use to support our business. Not only will it make their lives easier and maximise their time, it will help them respond more quickly and with fuller knowledge. For example, with the new system a customer can call into a branch or an office asking about our services, and an e-mail with all the relevant information to follow it up can be received by the relevant IFA within minutes of the call being made. With our old system that could have taken days."

Ambitious plan

Derick's plan to change the entire infrastructure would have seemed ambitious to an organisation with a large in-house IT department. With only four people in his team, Derick knew he would need outside help.

"We were very lucky in having the support of Woolwich Group IT, and they suggested we should invite Computacenter to work with us. I'd worked with them before, but this project had no hardware requirement so was my first experience of using Computacenter in a purely services context. Right from the outset, I was very impressed by the depth of their knowledge and project skills, as well as the quality of the engineers and management teams they deployed."

To manage the project WIFAS set up a project board that included Derick Simms and Dawn Johnson from WIFAS, together with representatives from the company's management services, training and business processes departments, as well as a technical analyst from Woolwich Group IT and Computacenter's Project Manager Rob Barber.

If the potential benefits of the project were considerable, so were the potential risks. Rob Barber recalls the first meeting, a Project Definition Workshop (PDW) set up by Computacenter. "We were tackling a major project that involved capturing and migrating data from seven different offices, replicating this into a new data centre and setting up disaster recovery. This was on top of refreshing the desktop and laptop infrastructure and implementing a server farm to manage the new thin client infrastructure.

"As part of the PDW we identified the dependencies from outside parties, and all the risks to the business that the project might cause. Our biggest concern was the migration of data, so from the outset we incorporated measures to ensure this would be protected.

"WIFAS is utterly dependent on its data and has a variety of proprietary systems that are vital to its business," he continues. "We use lead tracking and customer reporting software, both of which are based on ORACLE applications, and e-mail has become one of its most used methods for keeping the sales force and management in regular contact with each other. Document imaging is another area that generates a huge amount of traffic as each office captured a digital image of every piece of correspondence which used to be stored locally. We had to protect all of this data for each office while migrating it to the central server farm as we rolled out the new environment, so we took images of every single hard disk in each office before we migrated the data. It guaranteed that we did not lose a single file."

As well as protecting data during the migration, it was also essential that there was a long-term disaster recovery plan for these business-critical files, as Julian Goodbarne, Lead Consultant at Computacenter, explains: "Whenever you embark on a new IT project or rollout, you have to assess what disaster recovery strategy those new systems require to ensure business continuity. We worked closely with WIFAS from the outset to ensure that the company would have a swift and reliable disaster recovery strategy."

A key concern with WIFAS was its reliance on the servers located at its headquarters. These servers run the applications and house the information being used by the six regional branches and the remote work force,. " The servers were a potential point of failure. If for some reason the servers were knocked out by a fire or another emergency, services at all the WIFAS branches would also be knocked out, which would have a massive impact on the company and its customers." comments Julian.

After stringent tests during the design phase and close collaboration with Veritas, Computacenter deployed Veritas Backup Executive and Intelligent Disaster Recovery. This solution ensures that all data from the servers is backed up onto tape and that essential files critical to WIFAS' business can be accessed easily and effectively in an emergency.

Pride in the details

Derick recalls that this attention to detail was a particular aspect of the whole project that impressed him. "Computacenter uses its PRIDE project management methodology, which saves projects from being derailed by last minute changes to designs or specifications, giving the project manager the ability to find other ways of incorporating the additional functionality that these changes would have given. By planning everything down to the last detail we were able to achieve a very complex roll-out in an extremely tight timescale."

The roll-out of the thin client environment took place over a six week period. Once Computacenter's engineers had installed the server farm in the data centre, they set off on a rolling programme to convert the branch offices, capturing and migrating the locally held data, installing the thin clients, and upgrading the laptops of the IFAs to work in the new environment.

At each of WIFAS' six branch offices, Computacenter set up two rooms. One was a dedicated training environment, the other an engineering room where the IFAs' laptops could be upgraded and have the new software installed, together with a modem PC card that would allow them to dial in to the corporate network. Derick recalls that combined rollout and training programme worked very well. "We trained the IFAs in groups of eight over a two day period. As the IFAs came in to the offices, Computacenter took their laptops from them, and when they left two days later they were given either an upgraded or wholly new laptop. This allowed them to get to work immediately on the new system."

Dramatic results

The initial results were dramatic -the IFAs were soon very comfortable with the ability to connect to the network and download e-mails, scan the Internet for product information, and keep up-to-date with new developments in the company. However, , there was still one piece missing from the jigsaw, as Derick explains. "Not all the IFAs had easy access to a BT socket - one had his phone outlet in the kitchen, others had to disrupt the family's TV viewing to use the phone in the lounge. Even in the branches there was a problem because all our outlets are for a digital phone system. We really needed to go cellular, but I was not convinced that we could get the bandwidth or the coverage."

It was while attending the IT Director's forum, that the answer came, in the form of a chance meeting with Orange. "They told me that they could offer us up to 28Mbps connectivity and nearly total coverage, with a solution that required no hardware upgrades to the server, yet still preserve all our security requirements. All we had to do was to equip the laptops with mobile PC cards."

One small hurdle

Although in some ways it was the ideal answer, one small hurdle lay in the way - getting to over 220 mobile users spread around the UK, then asking them to surrender their laptops for a couple of hours for the cards and software to be installed. However, as fate would have it, Derick knew that the entire mobile force would be in a single place for one day for the annual sales conference. The only problem was that the event was less than three weeks away.

Mike Winstanley, WIFAS Account Manager at Computacenter, recalls the phone call from Derick. "He asked me if we were up for a challenge: Not only would we have to source the cards, we'd also have to install 220 of them in less than twenty-four hours. We immediately set about organising the hardware and the engineers, booking a room at the conference hotel and setting it up as an engineering base. We then shipped in a team of engineers to work around the clock. We took in the first laptop at 9.00 on the Thursday morning, and completed the last install at 6.00 am the next day."

Having risen to the logistical challenge, Derick's team added an extra level of value by taking the opportunity to health check the laptops wile they were being upgraded. This revealed two with significant hardware faults that were rectified as part of the process. "It was the ideal implementation," recalls Derick, "All the laptops were upgraded at one hit, and there was no impact on the business."

Computacenter also included the laptops in its disaster recovery plan, as Julian explains: "Staff store various customer documents, such as quotations, locally on their laptops. Without a backup, that data would be permanently lost if the computer was stolen or mislaid. By using Veritas NetBackup Professional, laptop data is backed up when users are online, enabling WIFAS to quickly restore the information to a new computer in the event of a problem."

Technologically delighted

Now that Project MIDAS has been successfully completed, Derick is happy to report that the IFAs are reaping the rewards of being able to connect to the network at any time and from any location. "The reaction has been exceptional. They are all delighted with the technology as they feel it is freeing them up to focus on their customers. As we implement new services we will be able to really use the connectivity to deliver competitive advantage to our people in the field and keep them up-to-date in real time.

"As a company, we took a very high profile leap by implementing such a huge change, but already we are getting interest from other parts of the group who are seeing how much better it has made our IFA's working conditions. It has been a challenging and demanding project, but it has gone without a hitch, and I can say in all honesty that we would not have achieved it without Computacenter."

 

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