When Craig Columbus took on the role of CIO at specialist heavy vehicle lease and rental company TR Group, he says he found himself at a company with a great culture and growth plan but also a company with “an underfunded, understaffed IT function, little technological maturity, and a mountain of technical debt to overcome.”

He first worked to gain the trust of the managing director, board, and senior leadership team and then to fundamentally transform the IT function from a simple, small business approach into a properly mature enterprise IT function.

“Much of what we’ve done may be considered, fundamental, ‘business as usual’, or even boring; but, building a solid, well-run, well-designed foundation on which to grow is one of the most important things a CIO can do for an enterprise.  That said, alongside the foundational improvements, there are also some true ‘business differentiation’ projects we’ve delivered, of which we’re extremely proud,” says Columbus.

Some of the key work delivered includes:

•  Investing in people: When he arrived, there were eight people in IT.  The team was too small to do the work internally and too small to adequately manage external providers.  “Covid slowed my hiring plans, but we still have managed to grow to 17 people in IT and expect to be at 35 by this time next year.  Project delivery time has shrunk by months, and we are now moving from ad-hoc releases of our proprietary software to regular two-week sprints.” The IT team also now has a dedicated purpose-built workspace.

• Movement of critical workloads from an on-premise environment to Azure: In 2019, TR Group had a woefully inadequate infrastructure, all locally hosted in a closet. They were at serious risk of an adverse event, according to Columbus. “I quickly implemented a cloud-first policy and began moving workloads to the cloud to ensure scalability, security, reliability, and all the other benefits that a cloud architecture can bring.  We no longer have key services and data onsite, with everything hosted either in a proper datacentre or in the cloud, providing all the benefits that cloud brings.”

•  Complete revision of network architecture:  The network was insecure, unreliable, and ageing.  It was completely replaced; the necessary engineers were hired, and it was moved to in-house oversight and operation in the process.  “We haven’t had an outage since and we now have full and proper segregation and visibility over all network traffic,” says Columbus.

•  ‘Work from anywhere’: TR Group had no meaningful work from home capabilities when Columbus joined the organisation. He replaced desktops with laptops where possible, implemented VPNs to Azure, and implemented AlwaysOn VPN.  “With Covid looming, I built a Windows Virtual Desktop environment to accommodate remote working from a home computer for those without a work laptop.  When lockdown arrived, we moved seamlessly to working remotely.  Remote work is now a standard offering to employees.”

•  Implementation of AI/ML based supplier statement reconciliation: TR Group AP previously spent up to 17 days per month manually reconciling statements from suppliers. Using AI/ML-based tools, the team automatically extracts all key statement information and then does an automated reconciliation process.  “This project is still running, but already it looks like we’ll reduce the manual review process by 80% by the end of 2022. The AP team will be freed up to do other work and we won’t have to grow the team as the business expands,” says Columbus. 

•  Design and implementation of data reporting and analytics platforms: The company has thousands of vehicles in its fleet but lacked the platforms to aggregate and analyse the data associated with the vehicles in a meaningful way.  The team partnered with an external vendor to build a cloud-based data and analytics platform that allows TR Group to see and analyse detailed information about each vehicle in the fleet.

“The way TR Group works and operates is fundamentally different from when I arrived,” says Columbus, “Our systems are reliable, secure, scalable, and performant. TR Group employees now have modern equipment and the ability to easily work remotely; remote work has now become part of our recruitment offer.”

“Educated guesses on vehicle performance, reliability, and profitability have been replaced with quantitative insights provided by data science.  Tedious manual processes are being replaced with AI/ML and process automation.  We have expanded into Australia, opened three branches, and have built Australia its own cloud-based technical infrastructure despite the challenges of lockdown.”  

“Perhaps none of this work is truly ground-breaking or innovative, but it’s often not the flashy, headline-grabbing work that makes for lasting success; it’s getting all of the fundamentals right and then iteratively building on a strong foundation to make something great,” he adds.