ITProposal

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Co-Founder of AsTools

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

AsTools B.V. is a Dutch e-commerce company specialising in automotive diagnostic equipment and workshop tools. We supply scan tools, diagnostic interfaces, programming and coding equipment and related accessories to independent garages, technicians and consumers, both in the Netherlands and internationally. All orders are shipped from our own stock in the Netherlands, supported by technical advice before purchase and a dedicated returns and warranty service afterwards.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire ITProposal to accomplish?

• Consolidation: from multiple IT vendors to a single party with one SLA.
• Freeing up internal capacity: move own people away from password resets and tickets, back to projects.
• Reduce downtime, with a concrete uptime percentage or maximum recovery time.
• Coverage outside office hours, including night, weekend, and peak periods.
• Predictable IT costs instead of fluctuating invoice amounts per incident.
• Raise security level, for example by rolling out MFA, getting endpoints managed, or demonstrating GDPR compliance.
• Scale up quickly with IT professionals through secondment without having to recruit yourself.
• Cloud migration or modernizing outdated infrastructure.

SOLUTION

How did you find ITProposal?

• Online Search
• Referral

Why did you select ITProposal over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from ITProposal were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

For managed IT and endpoint management, ITproposal took over device management across our team, including configuration, software deployment, patching and remote troubleshooting, with proactive monitoring rather than us reporting problems after the fact. 
On cybersecurity and GDPR, they carried out a security assessment of our environment, implemented multi-factor authentication and endpoint protection, and supported us on compliance documentation and processes for handling customer data. For cloud and Microsoft 365, they handled our environment including identity management, mailboxes, access control and backup, so that our commercial and logistics data sits in a managed and recoverable setup. For servicedesk and IT staffing, they provide our single point of contact for day-to-day issues and have supplied additional IT capacity when we needed it, which for a company of our size is more practical than hiring. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We did not run this as a benchmarked project with baseline figures, so I will describe it as we experienced it. The most noticeable change is that IT stopped being something we spend time on. Issues that used to sit unresolved because nobody owned them now go to one place and come back closed. Our webshop and back office have been stable throughout the period, including during high-volume stretches. On the security side, we went from an informal setup to one where access, devices and backups are actually documented and managed, which matters when business customers ask how we handle their data.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Communication runs through a fixed contact who knows our systems, which meant we stopped re-explaining our setup at every request. Deadlines were consistently met throughout the engagement, and rollouts were phased rather than done in one disruptive switch, which for a webshop that cannot go offline was the right call. When we raised something, it was picked up without us having to chase it, and response outside office hours has been handled by their own people rather than a generic answering service.

What was your primary form of communication with ITProposal?

In-Person Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their transparency was impressive. They tell you what something will cost, what it will do and what it will not do, before you commit. In IT services that is rarer than it should be. Combined with the fact that they both write the plan and execute it, it means we never end up somewhere we did not agree to be.

Are there any areas for improvement or something ITProposal could have done differently?

Nothing significant comes to mind. If I had to name one thing, it would be on our side rather than theirs: we could have brought them in earlier than we did, and moved the full scope over sooner instead of in stages. Looking back, we spent longer than necessary managing IT ourselves before handing it over.