Miller Homes Customer Case

Company background

Miller Homes is a respected national homebuilder with an established reputation for building high-quality family homes and excellent customer service. This reputation has helped Miller Homes to become the largest privately-owned housebuilder in the United Kingdom.

Miller Homes believes that by building homes safely, in a way which is considerate to the environment and by delighting its customers with a product and experience that recognises buying a home is a significant lifetime purchase, it will deliver superior long-term results for all its stakeholders.

Prior to working with Quistor we did have some concerns about their location outwith the UK, but these fears have been allayed by the quality and responsiveness of the service provided by Quistor.

The Challenge

The main IT challenge facing Miller Homes related to its dependence on a very old release of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (version 8.11 tools release.  8.98) running on an out-dated hardware and software environment. This was inhibiting Miller Homes’ business ambitions. For example, the company wanted to make use of mobile technology to enable its employees to work smarter to improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the business. This was not possible on the current version in use.  Furthermore, the old IT infrastructure was impacting users due to inadequate system reliability and performance.

There was also concern that users might become restless and dissatisfied if they felt their system usage was being hampered by the company’s use of old technologies.

The Solution

Miller Homes decided to upgrade to the latest release of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (9.2). The IT infrastructure remains in-house. For the previous five years, though, Miller Homes had been using externally managed services for technical and CNC (Configurable Network Computing) support. The decision to upgrade EnterpriseOne acted as a trigger to evaluate alternative suppliers for these managed services, which are critical to the smooth operation of the Miller Homes IT environment.

Any potential new provider of CNC and technical services needed to:

• perform the software upgrade to 9.2
• demonstrate its ability to deliver effective services in a professional and efficient manner
• deliver higher quality services than the incumbent supplier
• be price competitive

Miller Homes chose Quistor because it scored higher than its competitors on every metric. The company demonstrated that it is well managed and well organized. Its staff was very responsive and highly professional with excellent technical capabilities. Quistor also offered competitive pricing.

In summary, Miller Homes felt very comfortable with a decision to move its managed services to Quistor.

Quistor are very easy to work with, are very knowledgeable and will do whatever they can to help our business

Benefits

The main benefits to Miller Homes from using Quistor’s managed services are:

• There is no need to hire technical or CNC staff, which keeps IT overheads to a minimum.
• Miller Homes’ IT team and end users benefit from Quistor’s knowledge and skills gained from their working with many JDE customers.
• Both Quistor and Miller Homes work together as a cohesive team to implement new technology solutions to make the business more efficient and more effective. This is also helping to maintain staff morale.
• Quistor provides proactive guidance and advice to pre-empt and prevent future technical problems on Miller Homes in-house JD Edwards implementation.
• Quistor is pro-active and very responsive to Miller Homes’ needs. The company’s staff can rest easy in the knowledge that Quistor is there when needed to provide whatever assistance is required.
• Miller Homes now has a stable and reliable system, which is key to the efficient and effective running of the business. It has also resulted in good end-user satisfaction.