Case study: Macro Art

Macro Art - Where expansion is all part of the service

Even more so than most fast-growing SMEs, Macro Art has to think big. As one of the UK’s leading wide-format printers, it has a number of Guinness World Records to its name, including the world’s largest movie poster.

The company continues to grow rapidly following an MBO in 2014 and operates from a 41,000 sq ft purpose-built facility in Abbotsley, near St Neots and a London satellite office, opened in 2016.

As a white label supplier to many of the world’s largest brands, Macro Art is necessarily low key about much of its work but projects have included work for Farnborough and Paris air shows as well as producing flooring for the main arena in a £140,000 contract for the Paralympics at London 2012. It also produces work for the retail, automotive and exhibition sectors.

At a glance

Sector:

Printing

No. of employees:

Headquarters:

Abbotsley, Cambridgeshire

Locations:

Management team identify IT as key driver for growth

Macro Art’s management team had ambitious growth plans following the MBO but bottlenecks and reliability issues in their IT systems were causing concerns. The company’s previous outsourced IT provider had been with them for several years but there was a feeling that new ideas and a fresh approach were required if Macro Art was to realise its potential.

Requirements at a glance

Ongoing IT consultancy and support – providing strategic input to support growth plans as well as responsive helpdesk services to solve issues as they arise.
Greater data storage with immediate requirements for large format artwork.
Decommissioning of on-premise MS Exchange server and migration to Hosted MS Exchange platform.
A fast, reliable and secure form of remote access
A vision for a robust and future-proof data network.
A replicated virtual infrastructure with an effective and robust backup procedure.
Scope for acquisition of additional business to complement the core business operations.

The results

A fast, reliable, well managed and fully documented network with scope for growth.
A far more reliable e-mail system with business continuity and improved security independently of the on-premise infrastructure.
The confidence that we as a team can adapt to any internal developments while ensuring the existing core business remains unaffected.
An increasing portfolio of happy customers attained by ensuring that all IT related business operations are working at full capacity.
A good, solid working relationship where the levels of trust exist to give Macro Art the belief that they have the best outcome possible within the budget requirements.

The actions

Camb IT Support is providing unlimited telephone and remote support and silent monitoring to provide proactive and preventative IT support.
Full, live migration to MS Hosted Exchange platform completed out of hours to ensure minimal downtime.
Introduction of Network Attached Storage and a Microsoft Hyper-V environment to house Virtual Machines, snapshots and flat file backups.
Provided scope for growth with cost effective and scalable introduction of a fibre backbone and improved switch speeds and capacity.
Introduction of a SOPHOS XG 125 Firewall with fully encrypted SSL VPNs for all key users.
Increasing of bandwidth on existing radio based Microwave Internet connectivity.

IT is the core of our business, we manufacture large format prints that require files in gigabytes and lots of them. Our infrastructure needs to be able to cope with moving these files around a large factory environment as well as the management of a very busy front end office. Since 2014 we have worked very closely with Camb IT, the switch from our previous supplier was painless and my only brief to them was to prepare for growth.

In that time we have nearly doubled in turnover and this has required constant investment and upgrades to our IT services. We have a very close working relationship and this helps us to resolve issues very quickly, there have been a handful of partner services that have helped us to achieve growth and Camb IT have been integral to that.

Services provided by Camb IT

IT Support

IT Consultancy

Connectivity

Cloud services

Backups

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