Adecco Personnel Limited is an internationally recognized recruitment firm, with offices in over 60 countries and territories. In its Hong Kong and Macau offices alone, there are over 180 employees.

Of the wide range of services that Adecco provides, from temporary staffing and permanent placement to career transitions and talent development, as well as consulting and business process outsourcing, the responsibility of establishing and maintaining the integrity of its IT systems and infrastructure falls on the IT team.

 

“ From an end-user perspective, it has been a very smooth deployment process,

Microsoft Teams Voice is very simple to use and works without any major issues. ”

CFO
Adecco’s HK

Challenge:

During the uptrend of hybrid workplaces, companies around the world had to quickly find alternative ways of working as the world came to a standstill; the working patterns of companies and their employees drastically changed as lockdowns happened globally. Business contingency was at the forefront of all businesses’ priorities, and Adecco was no exception.

One of the pressing issues that their Assistant Manager of IT Production, Leo Tsang, needed to solve was ensuring employees could continuously work seamlessly while navigating through the hybrid workplace solution, regardless of employees’ working location. This meant the migration to cloud services such as File Servers and telephony services was of utmost importance to support the mobility of remote working.

Previously relying on traditional on-premise PBX, Adecco had to budget for physical phone set purchases and PBX maintenance, which can be costly. Additionally, Adecco constantly needed to closely monitor their office system and network, as they were using File Servers access through a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Whenever issues arose, it often required on-site support for first-line checks, and that caused disruption to employees’ workflow and potentially affected their customers.

Solution:

As part of his IT Production Assistant Manager role, Leo Tsang overlooks improvement planning and projects for the Hong Kong and Macau offices’ IT infrastructure.

Having gone through the pandemic and transitioning to a hybrid workplace, Leo was able to better understand the challenges and pain points employees faced with remote working. This also helped to make more informed decisions for the implementation of necessary Microsoft solutions in October 2022 to support flexible work arrangements for employees, as the world shifted to adapt and normalize the new normal of the hybrid workplace.

The solutions that Adecco decided to prioritize were Microsoft 365, MS Teams Phone, and a subscription to Azure Cloud. These were chosen to replace the existing on-premise PBX, for the main purpose to support the company’s imminent growth with the solutions implemented. Microsoft having a wide market share, and the compatibility of working in most countries played a big factor as well. 

There are many advantages of Teams Phone, and they have all greatly benefited Adecco employees and their IT team. Firstly, it eliminated the use of physical hard phones, which saved the company money that they would have otherwise had to spend on telephony servers, phone sets hardware costs, and maintenance fees. Employees can now answer business calls without the need to forward their calls to their mobiles, all while embracing flexible work arrangements.

Why SUPERHUB

As commented by Adecco’s HK CFO, ” From an end-user perspective, it has been a very smooth deployment process, Microsoft Teams Voice is very simple to use and works without any major issues.”

SUPERHUB supported Adecco as they moved forwards towards cloud-based solutions as part of their business continuity plan, through a series of consultation meetings to gather crucial information about the requirements that Adecco needed to address, before the project kick-off.

The deployment process included hardware purchases and site delivery from SUPERHUB, with SUPERHUB arranging for their Project Engineers to set up the necessary configurations and implementations before troubleshooting and familiarisation were done with the Adecco teams to minimize disruption to their workflow.

Thorough testing of the feature was done before it was deployed to Production, which led to User UAT and user training & onboarding, which allowed SUPERHUB to iron out any other issues that may arise. Once these deployment steps were concluded, then the full deployment of Teams Phone was completed.

Adecco has future plans to further future-proof itself and strengthen its Business Contingency plan. On the cards are being sever-less on-premise, which will reduce hardware set-up and maintenance costs, kick-starting a transformation to resemble a Disaster Recovery (DR) site which will allow for work to flow continuously even with office power or network outages, and lastly, for the introduction of Microsoft Azure SaaS whilst balancing the costs of implementation.