IT Outsourcing for a Large Real Estate Investment Trust

The Problem

A real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on retail businesses was outsourcing their IT operations to a local managed service provider (MSP). While their provider wasn’t necessarily doing a bad job reacting to their support issues, they weren’t taking many proactive steps to eliminate recurring issues and improve overall IT maturity.

This created several challenges including: 

• Support Inefficiencies: Response times to support requests were inconsistent, and recurring issues became frustratingly common.
• Lack of Strategic Advisory: The REIT decided it was lacking guidance on their overall IT strategy from their incumbent MSP, which provided mostly reactive day-to-day support.
• Limited Capabilities: Even though the MSP provided dedicated on-site support, they were missing the skillset to take on larger and more complex IT initiatives. 

The Solution

The company decided to explore other MSP options when their contract with the incumbent MSP expired. After vetting several providers, they selected 1Path due to a few unique factors. These include:

• Executive Sponsorship: Part of the decision to leverage 1Path over the other options came down to how involved their executive team was in building trust with their board and senior leadership team.
• Comprehensive Support: Another major contributing factor was 1Path’s ability to alleviate the burden of managing multiple vendors for cloud, security, and IT asset management services with a more comprehensive offering.
• Organizational Alignment: Part of their consideration came down to the size and scale of 1Path’s team and existing client base. Given the number and average size of existing clients, the REIT determined that 1Path was best suited to support them without exceeding their capabilities or prioritizing larger customers. 
• Business Process Automation: 1Path devised a plan to integrate and automate several common business processes used across the REIT's various portfolio companies to help standardize their IT support experience.

The Result

The transition to 1Path was seamless and the company saw immediate improvements to support efficiency and proactive engagement within their broader technology ecosystem. A few of the key results included:

• Improved First-Engagement Resolution: Because the 1Path team was diligent about documenting existing workflows and common support issues throughout the onboarding process, they were well prepared to respond to the company’s unique needs from day one.
• IT Advancement: In addition to improvements in day-to-day support, 1Path has been able to help the company better align its IT strategy and investments with the growth-oriented goals of the business.
• Enhanced Visibility & IT Cost Management: By consolidating the number of direct vendor relationships through 1Path’s rich network of partners, it’s become much easier to understand the cost of these various services and make informed decisions when budgeting for future investments.
• Standardized IT Processes: 1Path took steps to formalize processes like new-user onboarding and approvals for application access that applied to every portfolio company. With all these workflows documented, we were able to automate ticket routing and help streamline support.