Busy Bees deploys Office 365 to improve collaboration amongst its network of 52 preschools in Singapore
SINGAPORE – 9 December 2015 – Microsoft Singapore announced today that Busy Bees, a leading early childhood care and education provider headquartered in the United Kingdom, has successfully migrated to Office 365 for its 1,500 employees in Singapore.
Busy Bees, founded more than 20 years ago, is the largest childcare services provider in the U.K. The company recently expanded into Asia and has been growing rapidly since. The company now runs 52 childcare centres in Singapore and is looking to grow its operations quickly to achieve its goal of becoming the largest early education provider globally.
The company had been using on-premise servers for its emails and data storage and found it difficult to scale when needed. Also, the servers posed issues to end-users attempting to access emails and files, due to unanticipated downtime and connectivity issues. Busy Bees Asia also wanted to find a way to increase overall productivity without having to increase human capital investments – translating into a need for current employees to be more productive and collaborative.
“To grow the business, we had to be equipped with the right tools,” said June Rusdon, CEO of Busy Bees Asia. “We also needed to empower our employees to collaborate and share information more effectively, which can be challenging when they are spread across different locations in Singapore, as well as cross-border in Malaysia.”
After a thorough evaluation, Office 365, a cloud-based productivity suite was determined to be the most suitable solution for Busy Bees in terms of cost, operational suitability, as well as meeting the organisation’s needs for improved staff collaboration and productivity.
Busy Bees worked closely with Microsoft certified partner, AXIOM IT Solutions, to roll out deployment of Office 365 to all 1,500 staff in 52 locations in under five months. AXIOM IT Solutions assisted Busy Bees with coordinating deployment, while reducing downtime and conducting post-migration testing for each location. Employees’ familiarity with the Office suite of productivity tools and software meant the learning curve for users was minimal and also translated to fewer training sessions being needed for the transition to Office 365.
“We knew our staff required a secure system that was reliable, yet user-friendly, regardless of their tech-savviness. We tested the ease of use and efficiency of Office 365 by rolling out a group budgeting exercise, and I was impressed during the implementation,” said Rusdon. “With each centre collaborating easily through Office 365 and its applications like SharePoint, I now have access to business statistics no matter where I am. With greater operational transparency, Busy Bees is able to transform and transplant best practices from one centre to another faster, which ultimately means we are able to better care for our children.”
Post deployment, Busy Bees finds that employees are more productive and more engaged than before. Staff can now use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online for their daily work tasks, sharing presentations, reports and lesson plans instantly across the organisation – making for easier collaboration amongst co-workers and enabling employees to share ideas directly with business stakeholders.
Concerns over scalability are also a thing of the past. The management is confident that Office 365 is able to scale to meet their needs as and when required. “With Office 365 hosted on the cloud, we are able to adjust the number of users upwards or downwards when we need to. Also, we no longer have to maintain as many in-house servers or worry about rolling out software updates to users as Microsoft takes care of that on their end, freeing up the IT team to focus on adding value to the company rather than keeping the lights on,” said Jordan Yap, IT Director, Busy Bees Asia.
Beyond the lowered maintenance requirements and improved collaboration via the cloud-based Office 365 productivity suite, security and privacy of company data was of paramount importance, especially those pertaining to student particulars.
“At Microsoft, we understand the importance of information security to our customers no matter the industry they may be in. Microsoft constantly evolves Office 365 controls and stays up-to-date with standards and regulations across multiple industries and geographies so that our customers can have the peace of mind they need to better serve their charges. We are delighted to be partnering with Busy Bees to help them in their mission to bring quality childcare to more children across the world,” said Francis Choo, Small & Medium Business Lead, Microsoft Singapore.
With the recent release of Office 2016, Office is now more secure than ever before. Office 2016 apps with Office 365 deliver new capabilities for better enterprise security and protection. This includes built-in data loss prevention across Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook to reduce risk of leaking sensitive data, as well as multifactor authentication that ensures secured access to content even when employees are not on the corporate network.
Microsoft is also the first major cloud provider to adopt the world’s first international standard for cloud privacy, the ISO/IEC 27018. In Singapore, Office 365 has achieved the Multi-Tier Cloud Security Standard for Singapore (MTCS SS) Level-3 certification for Office 365, the highest level of certification available, complementing the service’s global independent verification specified in ISO 27001, EU model clauses, HIPAA BAA and FISMA.