You were struggling with your IT solution before, can you explain what was happening?
“It was a mess. I explained to Amtech that when I came here our solution was like Fort Knox. And when I say that, I mean it was impossible to change anything – it was a nightmare.
It was all set up in a way where there was no easy way to complete tasks and there was a lot of unnecessary security that slowed everything down when we needed something done. It was like Fort Knox, it was ridiculous, but thankfully Amtech is sorting it out now, but it really was a nightmare before.”
They’re not the normal on the clock, hour by hour service, you know. They don’t come down and focus on telling you how much it will cost – instead, they support you.
What type of things couldn’t you do?
“There were simple tasks that we just couldn’t do. It was really basic stuff like being able to change settings on our PCs and add printers. We use a biometric fingerprint machine and we couldn’t add things to our set-up there either. Our Wi-Fi also had issues and were suffering with the effects of legacy issues. I can only imagine it was set up that way to stop anyone not in IT doing anything for themselves.”
Were the issues impacting just your internal day-to-day or were members affected as well?
“It wasn’t just us internally to be fair, it did affect some of our members as well because there was no Wi-Fi at times and certain parts of the clubhouse had very limited access, but most of the hassle and grief was internal.”
Amtech are special because they don’t come down and focus on telling you how much it will cost – instead, they support you.
Did you need to bring a lot of your IT infrastructure to a more modern way of thinking?
“Yes, we did and, to a degree, we were still in the dark ages where we would have to pass papers around for certain things. I needed to bring out IT setup into the 21st century, remove paper and make everything more efficient for the members. We needed to make things simpler, but I couldn’t do that because I couldn’t even operate a tea booking system correctly because it was tied up in legacy issues.”
What kind of relationship did you have with Amtech before?
“I was put in contact with [Dave from Amtech] by another member and was told Amtech had helped them with CCTV cameras and all sorts of different weird and wonderful technology to integrate into that club. I thought it’d be too far for Amtech to come to be honest, as it’s 250 miles away, and he said ‘no, it’s all good, I’ll be down’ and he was.”
What’s Special About Amtech?
“They’re not the normal on the clock, hour by hour service, you know. They don’t come down and focus on telling you how much it will cost – instead, they support you. The important thing for Amtech is that they come and audit everything, and sort the issues out – and now we’ve also got a phone system that supports us. Amtech knows the end game and that is that they look after me as a customer, and as a result, they’ll get more support from our business at a later date.”
After initially speaking with Amtech, what happened next?
“So I asked him on the phone, to come down and have a look and he did just that. He was here for a complete morning. He looked at everything, inside out, back to front, from the Greenkeepers’ workshop to my office to see the task at hand. It’s complicated further because we’re 800 feet above sea level, so we are still connected to a radar network, it’s not cable, and there’s no fiber, so it wasn’t easy.
About 15/20 miles away there is a mast and that’s how we get our internet. So it was slow and tricky, but Amtech audited the whole site on the day and also did the silly little things like sorting the printer out.”