About Us
Highlander are an I.T. and telecoms support services provider with a strong reputation for delivering the highest standards in support, project delivery and commercial guidance for our client base. With almost 20 years experience in developing systems for Small and Medium Sized Organisations, Highlander’s success has been in upholding its core principles in service delivery, which are:
- Care
- Dedication
- Professionalism
- Respect
- Trust
By instilling these principles into every employee, Highlander ensure customer service is at the forefront of its daily operations. From its technical staff, through to service delivery personnel through to Accounts, all employees share the responsibility of keeping clients happy and understand their daily “moments of truth” with each client can make a difference to how successful our organisation is.
The Company History
Highlander Business Solutions is an IT Services organisation based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. The company was founded in 1995 and established by the still current Chief Executive, Robert Massie.
HBS started out as a retail outlet for consumers to purchase PC based systems and operated out of shop premises in Sheffield. The company quickly established itself as a supplier of reliable machines and this lead to the first commercial opportunity, to supply PC’s and assistive technology to Sheffield College, providing equipment to disabled students.
After this success Highlander successfully closed it’s retail operation, to concentrate solely on a business to business market. However, after some positive initial uptake for IT support, it was clear that growth had slowed considerably and fresh impetuous was needed to take the company forward.
In 1997 a new Chairman, Richard Field OBE, was installed and a strategy for growth was developed. Primarily focused on the quality of service to its client, something that had waned during the previous two years, the new strategy was aimed at client retention and instilling a caring attitude into all Highlander employees for the clients it served.
With less than a dozen employees, there was a clear direction the company would undertake and was based on implementing and managing the three following areas:
- Investment in engineering resource and technical staff. This included a steady recruitment drive of trained engineers with a client focus and experience of providing this service in similar roles previously. It also included, at great expense to the company, training courses to ensure that all technical staff were trained to the highest levels for the market sector HBS were catering for.
- The second investment was to install a new commercial account team. This team is responsible for managing the client from a commercial aspect, ensuring quotations are completed accurately, projects are managed correctly and most importantly, the design and implementation of IT strategies are developed for our clients. They work closely with the technical team to guarantee the technologies proposed fit with the client’s infrastructure and needs.
- The final achievement was to install a computerised system to support these business units. This was completed in May 2008.
Our aims for the future
Highlander Business Solutions’ core focus is now supporting small and medium sized businesses IT & Telecoms infrastructure. For the majority of our clients we are their IT department, providing helpdesk and 1stline support to users and server and infrastructure support in a similar way an IT team and IT Manager would for an organisation.
The technical team is made up of Helpdesk operatives, providing telephone and remote assistance support, Workbench technicians, building and repairing IT equipment, Technical call loggers, managing the calls through the system and escalating to Field Engineers, that carry out the installation of new equipment, systems and servers for the clients.
Commercially, there is a team of Account Managers, a Purchasing department, core administrative staff and a senior management team to support these units.
At present, Highlander Business Solutions hold approximately 150 support contracts with local clients, of which the relationships span back well over a decade in many instances. Although predominantly geared to providing services to clients, in the shape of time/consultancy and IT support contracts, HBS also sell I.T. equipment for this purpose including PC’s, servers, printers, software and networking equipment.
With the rapid growth in convergence of data and telephone systems, Highlander diversified into the telecoms arena in 2002, providing telephone systems and support to compliment it’s data offering.
HBS have key partnerships with industry leaders including Microsoft (Gold Partnership), HP, Avaya, Siemens, Citrix, Cisco, EMC, NetAPP, VMware, O2, Apple and IBM.
A message from the Chairman
Highlander is a company with integrity. Always highly professional, it´s commitment to customer care, business systems and investing in the right people is truly impressive. Add to this its enthusiasm and solid financial foundations, and you have a business that can look to the future with real confidence. We´re now exploring new technologies to offer our clients the widest possible choice to keep them at the cutting edge of business innovation. (Richard D Field OBE, Chairman)
