FluidOne boosts Griffiths' connectivity, to increase productivity and efficiency

Situation

Griffiths is one of the leading civil engineering and rail contractors working throughout Wales, the Midlands and south-west England. With two headquarters and a further nine regional offices, they have a workforce of over 1,000 people. They have a strong client base including the Welsh Government, Network Rail and Highways England, as well as local authorities, utility companies and several select, private sector organisations.

Whilst Griffiths run plenty of long-term projects spanning up to five years at a time, there are a significant number of shorter-term projects, lasting anything from three months to two years, where the company faced challenges with connectivity.

In 2018 Martin Brooks, Head of IT at Griffiths, approached their FluidOne Account Director, Michael Tomkins, to find a solution to the issues on their short-term projects.

“When we work on projects lasting three, four and five years, we usually get a fixed-line connection installed. This allows the team to connect to our SDWAN and company network, using routers, to access all the files they need to do their jobs out on site. However, on short-term projects, our teams still need to access the same information and data, but it isn’t feasible to get a fixed-line installed, the projects would be finished before that happened. Not only was this a huge logistical problem – the workaround was our people using their phones to work off of, which wasn’t very effective or productive. They also used their mobiles as hot spots causing a surge of data being used – so it was an expensive problem too! There can be between 50-55 sites of this kind live at any one time, with a varying number of people working there.”

Brooks continues, “We invited several big and well-known names to take part in a tender process alongside FluidOne. However, we just didn’t have any confidence in any of the other solutions that were presented. In the last two years, we have received excellent customer service, so we knew we could trust FluidOne.”

FluidOne has supported us to be more flexible and dynamic, which is a must in today’s environment.

Martin Brooks, Head of IT at Griffiths

Success

Griffiths prides itself on putting the needs of its clients first to provide the optimum solution.  But it can only do this if it has the right tools and infrastructure in place to enable its people to do so.

And that’s exactly what FluidOne solution has done – rapid and reliable connectivity for the teams out on the ground to access everything they need on the Griffiths network, wherever they are. This data sims package is also considerably cheaper than the teams using their mobile phones as hotspots.

There are other benefits with choosing FluidOne, according to Brooks,

“We get a comprehensive, monthly report that gives us visibility of our data usage, which can help us manage our spend better. This was really helpful recently when we all migrated to Office 365 – we were able to request additional data upfront as we knew that all our people’s devices would be re-downloading all their emails and files etc, from our network. Being able to plan this type of activity helps us manage our costs proactively, rather than having the extra data being categorised as an overcharge.”

“We could adapt quickly if there were a handful of people on any given site, or dozens. We were given dormant sim cards that we could keep in the office, and if needed, we could make one call to Michael, and that card could be activated and ready to use within 24 hours.”

He concludes, “FluidOne has supported us to be more flexible and dynamic, which is a must in today’s environment.”

FluidOne has helped Griffiths increase their efficiency and productivity, ultimately helping them to focus on their clients instead of their connectivity.