Headquartered in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Phoenix Petroleum was founded in 2002 to fill a void in the petroleum construction industry. Since then, they’ve added three additional Canadian offices in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; Edmonton, Alberta; and London, Ontario to service their clients in Canada and throughout the Caribbean. Their business is comprised of tradesmen, experienced engineers and a management group. As the company grew and they established deeper relationships with clients, Phoenix started taking on larger projects and often acted as the primary contractor, managing entire projects for their clients. In addition to undertaking large-scale projects, Phoenix also provides daily service to retail sites and smaller businesses.
Phoenix has been a long-standing Jonas partner since 2002 on the on-premise version of Jonas Enterprise. In 2019, they migrated their operations to the cloud with Jonas Cloud.
Recognizing The Problem
IT Manager Tim Thornton, who is responsible for IT operations at all four branches, as well as project management recognized that the infrastructure was due for a change prior to moving to Jonas Cloud.
Phoenix had gone through two servers and Thornton was performing manual backups every day, which meant extra time out of his day, as well as taking up additional space in the office to securely store the backup tapes.
“We realized in 2019 that working from the cloud was going to be the way of the future.” said Thornton.“Plus, the convenience of not having to do backups anymore was priceless.”
From 2012 to 2020, the number of Jonas users at Phoenix doubled. As Phoenix grew, the impact of running large queries, worsened. When one user ran a large query, it would slow down the system for the remaining users. So as Phoenix scaled up, so did this problem. After replacing the server for the second time in 2012, Jonas on-premise ran well for a number of years until it was apparent technology had surpassed what their server was capable of handling.
Jonas Cloud To The Rescue
The transition to Jonas Cloud couldn’t have taken place at a better time for Phoenix Petroleum. The COVID-19 pandemic followed shortly in the winter of 2020, affecting numerous businesses around the world.
Phoenix staff had approximately six weeks to work with Thornton at the office in the Jonas Cloud environment, before the pandemic mandated the closure of all non-essential businesses. Fortunately, for their team they were already on the cloud at that point, so the transition was quite easy and everyone was comfortable with working from home when the time came.
When the pandemic hit “Our Jonas users were able to just pack up their laptops and work from home with no interruptions. It would have been a nightmare to train everyone on VPN and remote desktop access.” Thornton noted that working on the VPN previously resulted in terrible lag times.
Thornton even surmised that Jonas Cloud may have even helped save a few employees from company layoffs “[Not having Jonas Cloud] could have potentially led to a few more layoffs, just because people wouldn’t have been able to work as efficiently.”
After the move to Jonas Cloud, staff at Phoenix Petroleum immediately noticed the difference in speed and performance of Jonas. Running an aged receivable report, which used to require 20 to 25 minutes of time, was now shaved down to a mere 12 seconds. With 20% of staff running reports regularly, Thornton and his team couldn’t be more pleased with how much more time their staff has gained to focus on other pressing tasks.
With Jonas Cloud, the employees of Phoenix Petroleum have been able to continue to operate as smoothly – if not more efficiently as they did in the office amid the pandemic lockdown.
Benefits
Since moving to Jonas Cloud, Thornton has earned back countless hours of work time from helping staff with IT requests, tending to server complaints and cleaning up task files. Tim saves approximately 5 hours a week out of a 40-hour workweek, not having to deal with issues, giving him an extra 12.5% of his time back to work and plan for other projects.
Since 20% of the staff run reports regularly and reporting was 125x faster than before, Thornton and his team were ecstatic to have earned extra time back into their work day. “The first few weeks everyone was just praising how fast everything was,” said Thornton. “Everyone was pleased and commented that there was no office downtime.”
In addition to the immense savings in time, Thornton was also happy to report that they were also able to implement the Field Time module, which they previously were unable to do due to the age of the server. Moreover, they were able to eliminate some third-party software solutions, fill some gaps in the approval processes and access data and other information they didn’t have before.
Conclusion
With four offices across Canada and customers in Canada and all over the Caribbean, Phoenix Petroleum required a safe, dependable software that could provide them access to real-time data, 24-hours a day. After years of working with Jonas Enterprise on the on-premise solution, IT Manager Tim Thornton recognized the increasing need to move into the cloud to keep up with technological advancements and their growing business.
After migrating to Jonas Cloud, Thornton and his team immediately noticed the difference in the speed of Jonas, allowing them to run reports exponentially faster than before and freeing up more time in their workday to focus on other tasks. As the spearheading force behind moving to Jonas Cloud, “I’ve never experienced a changeover go so smoothly.”
Since moving to Jonas Cloud, Thornton no longer has to generate daily backup tapes and find safe storage for the tapes in the head office. He can also rest assured that if the company continues to grow, Jonas Cloud can easily adapt their new users by simply providing login information.
After being hit with the unexpected nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19, Phoenix Petroleum was able to resume operations, working as efficiently at home as they did in the office.
