The challenge
Core50 is an engineering consultancy whose engineers and technicians spend much of their time on site, inspecting construction work and issuing PS4 construction review producer statements to clients. When we started working together in 2021 the business was growing into a second office and needed its technology to keep up: files were in Dropbox, phones were tied to desks and personal mobiles, there was no standard for security or backup, and every site inspection ended with a technician copying a Word template and editing it by hand to produce the report. The firm needed a proper Microsoft 365 foundation, reliable phones and networks in both branches, and a better way to get from an inspection to an issued PS4 document.
What we did
We set up the foundation first and have managed it since:
- Microsoft 365 tenant set up from scratch, with email, Teams and SharePoint, and multi-factor authentication for every account
- File migration from Dropbox to SharePoint, so documents live with the rest of the Microsoft 365 environment and are governed by the same access controls
- Endpoint protection, backup and disaster recovery across the firm's devices and Microsoft 365 data, with site monitoring so issues are seen before they are reported
- Printix cloud print management, so printing works the same way in both offices
- 3CX phone system for the office landlines and 0800 number, with a 3CX extension for every staff member so they call customers from the company number rather than their personal phones
- Networks for both branches, Hamilton and Taupō, including internet, static IP addresses and the office network itself
Then we built the inspection app. A technician completes a site inspection on a custom checklist designed for the type of inspection, submits it to a peer reviewer who checks it, and the app issues the PS4 document report to the client. The checklists and the report are generated from the same data, so nothing is retyped and every report is consistent.
The results
Core50 runs two offices on one Microsoft 365 environment with one IT partner to call. Staff answer and make calls on the company number from wherever they are, files are in SharePoint rather than scattered across Dropbox, and the business has security, backup and monitoring in place without an internal IT team. Inspections that used to end with an evening of editing a Word template now flow from checklist to peer review to an issued PS4 report inside one app.