Broxap Street Furniture is a family-owned business specialising in the design, manufacture and installation of outdoor seating; bollards; bins and planters; shelters, canopies and walkways; cycle parking; timber playgrounds; sports and outdoor gym equipment. It includes the brands Hand Made Places, Stadia Sports, Sunshine Gym and bollards.co.uk which all operate from a six-acre production and office site in North Staffordshire. Based in the heart of the UK, Broxap Street Furniture delivers products to cities, towns and villages across the country and works to bring outdoor spaces to life.

The Challenge

Broxap Street Furniture needed to accelerate plans to migrate to a hosted telephone solution and approached UK IT Networks for assistance.
The IT team at Broxap had already identified how it could deliver a home working solution through a different platform, as its existing system relied heavily on the department’s admin time. Instead, it wanted to empower users as they adapted to working from home and, as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, it quickly became clear that its existing service was not sustainable. Acknowledging that a new solution was required, Broxap called for a rapid response from UK IT Networks which was able to provide the new platform and hardware in a short space of time.

“Although we had a solution in place to meet the requirements of home working, we wanted to fast-track our plans to adopt a hosted telephone system to reduce the admin role demanded from the IT team. This, in turn, supported a more comprehensive work-from-home solution for our employees.” Michael Moreton, IT Manager, Broxap Street Furniture

The Goals

Broxap required a unified communications service to support staff, with seamless, user-controlled movement between devices and locations. This meant employees could still work and interact as one organisation no matter where they were operating from. Broxap has an established relationship with our directors which opened up commercial discussions based on its business needs. Together we decided the 8×8 platform best supported Broxap as an agile organisation, effectively upgrading its communications systems and giving the company flexible interaction options.

The Solution

The 8×8 platform is an all-in-one communication system allowing users to work from any location, using any device. It offers secure and reliable video conferencing, chat and business phone functions. UK IT Networks provided Broxap with demos, support and tutorials and was able to adapt the product to suit the business’s needs. In a partnership approach, Broxap’s IT management completed most of the set-up enabling the team to roll out the solution within its timeframe.

“We chose 8×8 because of the dashboard’s design, sleekness and the maturity of the product.” Michael Moreton – IT Manager at Broxap

The Impact

As we dealt with 8×8 on Broxap’s behalf, the IT team could focus on their priority tasks. We took care of the number porting and set up the core platform ready for the IT team to configure the system and integrate it into Broxap’s business operations. The migration to a new hosted telephone system was more of an upgrade rather than a response to an issue but with UK IT Network’s support, Broxap was able to make the switch to a new provider quickly, efficiently and without disruption.

“UK IT Networks had the availability and skillset to quickly turn around our integration. Our IT team has a huge amount of experience. Using our own skills and the knowledge from UK IT Networks allowed us to migrate to a new platform with zero downtime very quickly. The new 8×8 hosted system allows us to be more flexible while maintaining seamless communications.”  Michael Moreton – IT Manager at Broxap