Significant temporal flexibility at a reasonable price
Palin Granit Oy is a stone quarrying company operating all over Finland. The family business Palin Granit was established in Loimaa in the early 1920s. By merging with the Norwegian Lundhs AS in 2014, the companies became the largest natural stone miner in Northern Europe. The mining itself does not require complicated IT systems, but the functionality of connections and systems is very important, as stated by Financial Officer Lauri Kivinen of Palin Granit Oy:
When talking to international clients, e-mail, certain systems, and network drives are essential. Stone data need to be tabulated quickly at the quarry, from where they must be quickly entered into the storage and invoicing system that we maintain via our Norwegian partner by means of a remote connection. Communication must be reliable at all times and in all directions, including transporters, shipping companies, and clients.
The cooperation between ITpoint and Palin Granit began in 2014. The mutual interests of the companies were recognised and details agreed on without any trouble:
When selecting a partner in 2014 it seemed that a small or medium size company like ours wasn’t very interesting as a client for many companies. But along came ITpoint, and cooperation with them began very easily.
Working around the clock to help the company
Palin Granit is very satisfied with ITpoint’s operations. The company has recently taken over the procurement of mobile devices with which ITpoint has been assisting. The best server solutions have also been figured out together. Kivinen emphasises the importance of mutual understanding and honesty:
ITpoint has been an honest partner for example on the server side, even when we have wanted to decrease the number of services we buy from them such as those relating to server rooms. Flexibility is particularly important in terms of customer service. Service has been available at a reasonable price especially during weekends and evenings.
ITpoint cannot compete with the largest IT companies in terms of resources. This means that other properties such as perseverance and dedication are valuable. Kivinen recalls an example of ITpoint accomplishing great things in a short period of time:
In July of 2016 our old Exchange server “resigned” and was so thoroughly corrupted that not even Microsoft experts were able to restore its contents. Luckily this was the slowest month of the year, so we switched from repairs to the introduction of Office 365 on the fly. As a client this was of course a major difficulty for us, but I think that the flexibility of ITpoint – working pretty much “around the clock” for a few days – made it possible to get back to normal surprisingly quickly. We were able to restore our old e-mails, “losing” maybe only one day’s worth, which has not caused any deals to get cancelled for example.