IT Outsourcing Case Study: Auxis Maximizes Performance for a Fast-Growing Franchising Organization

Client Profile

Our private equity-backed client has operated as a leading franchisor of commercial cleaning services for more than 35 years. Based in South Florida, its network includes more than 8,000 franchised businesses servicing more than 50,000 customers across 90 global markets. Estimated annual revenue is more than $70 million.

As the client’s business rapidly grew and additional services were added, its small, internal IT Department quickly became a pain point:

• IT operated in firefighting mode, lacking enough resources, structure, tools, performance metrics, or operating visibility to handle business growth.
• With no structured processes or documentation, IT operations were people-dependent – reliant on knowledge retained by a single employee to complete many tasks. That created high risk: the organization suffered a loss of valuable skills, experience, and expertise if the person left or even didn’t come into work for a few days.
• With IT spending at 0.8% of revenue, the client was significantly underspending on its IT function – about 50% less than similar midsize companies, according to benchmarking data. Generally, IT budgets that are less than 1% of revenue indicate immature IT organizations with multiple risk factors, including understaffing for most internal IT functions. The client had money to invest in IT, but internal IT staff lacked expertise and were too consumed by day-to-day operations to focus on innovation or improvements.
• IT needed to provide technical support to an ever-increasing number of franchises across different time zones. However, without a dedicated help desk, support calls were routed to an on-call cell number that was inconsistently monitored. Tickets were not logged or tracked in the proper Infrastructure Technology Service Management (ITSM) tool, service levels were poor, often frustrating users with prolonged response times, inadequate schedules, an outdated knowledge base, and limited documentation or metrics.
• Without proper planning, the company’s IT infrastructure had grown bloated, outdated, and overly complex, with diverse systems spread across many locations that created a challenge for IT support. Many groups had developed manual workarounds and operations to accommodate technology gaps.
• Infrastructure was dated and inefficient with a lot of opportunities for consolidation and refresh.
• Security practices were not sufficient to provide a secure computing environment.

To keep pace with its rapid growth and overcome its pressing gaps, the client opted to outsource its infrastructure monitoring and management, service desk, and desktop support to Auxis.

Auxis performed an assessment to identify gaps regarding infrastructure controls, current technologies, and service desk best practices. The resulting IT outsourcing model included key improvements like:

• Adoption of the ITIL standard process framework, using best practices to implement repeatable IT processes and procedures that manage efforts and align to business priorities.
• Clear documentation of IT infrastructure architecture, as well as governance and operational processes and procedures.
• Simplifying and Consolidating the complex IT infrastructure environment by decommissioning about 60% of the physical servers scattered around the country. The remaining servers were modernized into centralized virtual machines, creating standardization that made them easier to support.
• Replacing the client’s reactive technical support approach with a proactive, 24x7x365, high-performance service desk staffed by skilled and redundant resources. Auxis used the IT best practices framework to increase the maturity level of support and identify and resolve issues promptly.
• Implementing the robust SysAid service management tool to track, monitor and report ticket performance, stemming from infrastructure, the service desk, and desktop support.
• Modernizing the client’s email and calendaring toolset by moving it from an outdated Microsoft Exchange platform to the cloud-based Microsoft 365 productivity toolset.
• Ensuring up-to-date, off-site and reliable data backups by migrating them from on-premises servers to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
• Implementing strong security awareness training for end-users to reduce exposure to security breaches triggered by malicious emails.
• Improving infrastructure performance by implementing 24×7 monitoring of system availability and health.
• Providing clear visibility and metrics based on robust SLAs to ensure optimal IT performance and quickly address issues.

Auxis continues to deliver trusted IT outsourcing services that maximize the performance and scalability of the client’s infrastructure operations and technical support.

Key results include:

• IT services ready to scale with business growth: With best practices and deep experience optimizing IT processes for a wealth of clients, Auxis created process-dependent IT operations that can be performed by any technical staff. They are easy to scale as the business grows.