10 minute read
Business Engagement Profiles
A Midlands-based telecommunications company is expanding its footprint across the region – helping more and more businesses stay connected with their customers and teams.
dbfb is based in Northampton but has enhanced its presence in Coventry and Warwickshire after extending its partnership with CityFibre, the company rolling out a full-fibre network in Coventry. dbfb, which employs around 45 people and celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2023, offers a range of communication solutions that are designed to keep businesses connected, talking, mobile, secure and supported.
With businesses striving for more profitable growth, the integration of telecommunications and operating models
Connecting
across the region
are becoming increasingly linked, and with more services shifting to the cloud, now is an ideal time for businesses to start laying the platform foundations that they can continue to build on.
Emma Mullings, the company’s head of marketing, said there were strong opportunities for growth in the region as Coventry and Warwickshire remains a buoyant economy.
She said: “We’ve joined up as Business Engage members of the Chamber and we’re getting out to quite a few events to help raise our profile because we feel there is a really good opportunity to work with businesses in this area.
“We work with companies of all sizes and across all sectors. We’re commercially competitive, contractually flexible, provide better service and we give back to the local community."
Emma added: “At the end of the day, we sell what large corporates do. But by choosing us as your communications partner, you’ll receive a more personalised and customised service. We know more and more businesses are making a digital investment, however, some are still choosing product silos from multiple large companies, rather than looking at integrated solutions. This results in disjointed customer service and higher operating costs but we’re here to help fix that.”
Simon Pickering, managing director of dbfb said: “The truth is, some large companies aren’t servicing their customers correctly and we aren’t afraid to admit that service is something we do particularly well, with a 98.7% customer satisfaction rate. We invest in technology specialists who take the time to understand your business and map out the issues you’re trying to resolve. By taking this approach, you receive a solution that’s fit for purpose, rather than just ‘sold’, because they are the products that we sell.
“Offering customers only what they truly need and by ensuring the highest levels of service has stood us in good stead over nearly a quarter of a century now and that is something that we will continue as we expand across the region.”
For more information on dbfb go to https://www.dbfb.co.uk/
Leading the
charge for greener energy in the region
A business on the border of Rugby and Coventry is offering firms in the region the potential to tap into the renewable electricity it generates from farm crops.
Channing Digester Ltd is based at Brandon Grange Farm and is run by brothers Alistair and Andrew Channing, having been a family farm for more than 100 years.
Just over a decade ago, they decided to phase out the farming of potatoes and their dairy herd and took the decision to invest in an anaerobic digester, which can burn anything from manure to food waste, and turn it into electricity.
They now farm around 900 acres worth of maize each year and also buy in maize from other local farms to feed into the digester.
It generates 499 Kilowatts per hour and is fed back into the grid as well as powering the family home on the farm. They are keen to expand this by an extra 1MW, but the grid connection cost is making the expansion unviable.
Now Alistair believes there is the potential to sell direct to businesses in the local area and even create a battery charging centre on site for a regional transport operator.
He said: “We decided about 12 years ago that traditional farming wasn’t the way we wanted to go and my wife was working in the anaerobic digestion industry, so we decided to look into it and made a significant investment.
“This has been a family farm for around 110 years so it was a big step but we felt that it was the right time to move into a new area of business.
“We grow the maize that we feed into the digester and also purchase some in from other farms, who use it as a break-crop for their wheat. It means as well as running our own business, we are contributing to the local rural business community too.
“Everything we generate is sold back into the grid but we believe there is potential to do more.
“We want to talk to businesses in the local area – say in Ansty or Binley – who may want to purchase electricity from us direct because that could definitely be done and would offer them a greener, more sustainable source of electricity.
“We would just need to connect them up to us via a cable, agree a cost and go from there. I am not sure businesses know that this opportunity is there for them but we would be happy to talk to companies about what we can provide.
“We’d also consider creating an on-site charging centre for, say, a local bus or coach operator that use electric vehicles. We would create a new entrance and install charging points, and then use the electricity generated by the digester to charge the vehicles. We also have a large amount of waste heat available for businesses who have a high energy requirement.
“There is massive potential in what we do here and we just want to get the message out to businesses in the area of what we could do for them.”
For more information or to get in touch with Channing Digester Ltd please contact Alistair on 07887 561202.
Local technology firm
going for growth
A Coventry-based software provider has reported record 30 per cent year-on-year global growth following the launch of its new Financial Statements, and Budgeting & Forecasting tools.
Situated on the Middlemarch Business Park, Phocas Software is a cloud-based business planning and analytics solution that allows organisations to collect, share and analyse large amounts of data from across their operations. Serving hundreds of SMEs throughout the Midlands and beyond, its mission is simple - to make businesses feel good about data.
UK Managing Director, Mike Hills, explained: “The likelihood is you’ll be generating huge amounts of data, whether you’re operating regionally, nationally or globally. All this data is also probably sat across multiple siloed systems such as your business’s ERP or CRM so you never have a complete picture of performance on which to base decisions.”
Founded in 2001, the company believes its dynamic, purpose-built software relieves all these challenges by bringing data together from different sources to enable users to monitor KPIs on sales, stock and finance in real-time.
Mike added: “This means no more waiting for finance or IT to run static spreadsheetbased reports that are instantly out of date, open to error and potentially insecure. Instead, there is a single source of truth to empower decision-making.
“Until 2020, we were solely a business intelligence platform. Recognising the integral role finance teams continue to play, we developed Phocas Financial Statements which sits as a user-friendly ‘skin’ over a business’s ERP system. The solution speeds up month-end reporting by up to 50 per cent and makes the numbers more accessible to the wider business. This empowers middle management to better serve customers or address inefficiencies in the business.
“One of the biggest issues with static financial reports is when people have questions about the numbers, they have to go back to the finance team who need to investigate further and generate more static reports. For this reason, the budget process is often a dreaded task but, a necessary evil as we all know an accurate budget is the backbone of a well-run organisation.
“Designed to complement Phocas Financial Statements, our Budgeting and Forecasting tool saves valuable time and makes company-wide analysis and budgets easy-to-do tasks. The software enables finance teams to build budgets in a live data analytics environment with access to historical and current figures.
“Inevitably the rapid growth of our product portfolio has seen our UK team grow rapidly too; with the Coventry office now home to a talented team of 58. Fostering our core values of ‘Fun. Fulfilling. Forever’, investing in our people remains our top priority and we look forward to continuing on this exciting growth journey together.”
More information about Phocas Software, including details of an exclusive introductory offer for CWCC members, can be found by visiting: www.phocassoftware.com/cwcc
WM5G moves into Coventry
West Midlands 5G (WM5G), a brand new innovation and digital acceleration company, has recently moved into offices in Coventry city centre.
WM5G was born from a three-year DCMS funded programme to accelerate the roll out of 5G and be the lead partner of the DCMS 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme.
West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) was awarded funding in March 2019 by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) to deliver a 5G Test & Trials Programme, a multi-million-pound programme to develop and deliver the UK’s first regional 5G test bed delivering a number of projects to speed up the launch of 5G networks and test, prove and scale-up new 5G products and services – for local people, public services and businesses. In March 2022, the Government-funded project came to an end and WM5G is now a brand-new innovation and digital acceleration company using this established credibility and proven success and learnings from the testbed trials.
Despite the company name, WM5G doesn’t only help accelerate the benefits of 5G in the West Midlands, it also helps businesses innovate and become future fit through connectivity solutions, Internet of Things and AI across the UK.
Coventry was the first choice for the company’s new headquarters due to it being a fast-growing city, the legacy of UK City of Culture 2021, and connectivity by road and rail.
To kickstart WM5G’s presence in the city, WM5G kicked off its journey to support SMEs in digital adoption by launching the region’s first Digital Festival, a two-day programme to help businesses in the Coventry and Warwickshire region discover the transformational benefits of digital technologies to drive efficiencies and growth.
The interactive Digital Festival was designed to inspire and equip business owners and those interested in accelerating tech in their business, with the skills and knowledge to apply a range of tech solutions.
With over 40 organisations attending the two days, the event was a great success with not only supporting organisations on their journey in digital adoption but also to let Coventry and the wider regions know that WM5g is here to help simplify the benefits of tech and digitalisation.
Robert Franks, Managing Director, said: “We started WM5G just over three years ago with two key objectives, to test, prove and scale new 5G services and accelerate 5G and fibre networks. This has resulted in some great successes including the West Midlands now being the bestconnected Combined Authority region for 5G in the UK.
“In healthcare we’ve proven how 5G can transform patient care, and in transport we’ve proven how this improved connectivity can reduce congestion and pollution and improve passengers’ experiences.
“We are now moving on to the next phase of our business, scaling-up these innovations by working in partnership with the West Midlands, other regions, government, and private sector companies from our new Coventry HQ.”
