entrustIT Insights | Tom Dodd (2)

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News and Insights from the entrust IT Group

Deep Dive: How Smart Sensors unlock Value for Multi-Site Businesses

Multi-Site businesses sites face a familiar challenge: rising energy costs, tighter climate legislation, and increasing expectations from customers and staff for safe, comfortable, and sustainable spaces. One technology is quietly transforming how forward-thinking businesses meet these demands—smart sensors.

Windows 10 EOL - Why it Actually Matters

As a C-Suite leader, you’re tasked with making decisions that protect your business, its operations, and its bottom line. One decision you cannot afford to delay is upgrading your organisation from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

Business Process Audit: Unlocking Efficiency in Multi-Site Operations

For UK multi-site businesses—whether in retail, hospitality, logistics, or services—the business process audit is a strategic lever for profit improvement, compliance assurance, and sustainable scalability. Done right, it is not a “tick-box” exercise, but a deep, forensic look at how your organisation actually runs compared to how you think it runs. In this guide, we’ll cover what a business process audit involves, the level of depth possible, and the efficiencies and savings it can unlock for multi-site leaders in the UK. What is a Business Process Audit? A business process audit is a structured review of an organisation’s core and supporting processes to evaluate their effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance with internal standards, legal requirements, and industry best practice. Unlike a financial audit (which focuses on numbers), a process audit looks at workflows, decision points, technology use, and human interactions—mapping them against strategic objectives. For multi-site companies, the objective is twofold: Standardise best practice across all locations. Identify bottlenecks, duplication, and waste that erode profitability. What Does It Cover? A well-designed business process audit will be tailored to your sector and scale but typically includes: Operational Workflows – From procurement to delivery, mapping every step for time, cost, and value contribution. Compliance & Risk Controls – Ensuring processes meet UK regulatory requirements (GDPR, Health & Safety, employment law) and internal governance. Technology Integration – How ERP, CRM, EPOS, and other systems interact; identifying manual workarounds and shadow IT. People & Role Efficiency – Analysing role clarity, task duplication, and alignment with skill sets. Customer Experience Impact – Evaluating how processes affect speed, service quality, and satisfaction scores. Data & Reporting Flows – Verifying accuracy, timeliness, and usefulness of management information. For C-Suite leaders, the audit’s scope can range from broad diagnostic to deep dive in a single function (e.g., supply chain optimisation or finance process automation). How In-Depth Can a Business Process Audit Go? Depth depends on objectives and appetite for disruption: Level 1: Light-Touch Diagnostic – Interviews, site visits, and process maps for top-line issues. Useful for identifying “quick wins” with minimal disruption. Level 2: Functional Deep Dive – Time-and-motion studies, data analytics, and system log reviews. Suited to functions with known underperformance. Level 3: Full End-to-End Audit – Enterprise-wide mapping of all core processes with quantitative KPIs, benchmarking against best-in-class peers. This is transformational in scope, often preceding a reorganisation or major tech investment. For multi-site firms, Level 3 audits frequently uncover inconsistencies between locations—a top cause of uneven customer experience and margin leakage. Efficiencies a Business Process Audit Can Uncover Process Standardisation – Aligning procedures across all sites to ensure consistency and scale benefits. Elimination of Redundancy – Removing duplicated steps, paperwork, or reporting loops. Time Savings – Automating routine tasks, reducing hand-offs, and speeding up approvals. Cost Reductions – Lowering operational expenses via smarter procurement, leaner staffing models, or reduced wastage. Improved Compliance – Reducing risk of fines, reputational damage, and operational disruption. Better Use of Technology – Replacing manual interventions with ERP/CRM integrations; cutting reliance on spreadsheets. Data-Driven Decision-Making – Streamlined reporting gives executives real-time insight for faster, better decisions. One UK retail chain, after a six-week business process audit, found 22% of finance team time was spent on duplicate data entry due to poor system integration—automation delivered an annual saving of over £350,000 without headcount loss. Why It Matters for Multi-Site Businesses Multi-site organisations carry complexity by design—geographic spread, varied local management, and legacy systems make process drift inevitable. A business process audit identifies these drifts early, stopping inefficiencies before they harden into culture. For the C-Suite, this is about more than cost-cutting. It’s about: Strategic agility – Processes that can flex to market change without chaos. Consistent customer experience – Every site delivering the same brand promise. Investment readiness – Clean, standardised processes make tech roll-outs and M&A integrations smoother. Implementation and Next Steps Step 1: Define scope and objectives – Align on whether you’re looking for targeted fixes or transformational change. Step 2: Choose an independent auditor – Internal teams often miss embedded inefficiencies due to familiarity bias. Step 3: Act on findings – The audit is worthless without rapid implementation of recommendations. Step 4: Make it cyclical – Re-audit every 18–24 months to keep process discipline sharp. entrustIT's vCIO services can help entrustIT's Digital Transformation service provides you with our board-level consultancy in every corner of your business. Our consultants cover your processes among finance, HR, sales, distribution and more. Read more about our digital transformation services here

Stopping Retail Theft and Sweethearting entrustit

Stopping “Sweethearting” & Staff Theft at the Checkout: A Playbook for Retailers

Retail shrink isn’t just a back-of-house problem. At the checkout—manned lanes, SCO, scan-and-go-the risk of sweethearting (staff giving away items or discounts to friends/family) and other employee fraud quietly erodes earnings. With shop theft and overall shrink hitting record levels, ignoring internal loss at the till is no longer tenable.

Image showing the emotional and mental impact of ransomware

The Human Impact of Ransomware

In April of 2025 Co-op was hit by a devastating cyber attack. Thanks to quick reactions from the IT team, who acted decisively to take the entire company's IT systems offline, they avoided a punishing Ransomware attack. Nevertheless - customer data was compromised. The criminals stole personal information of all 6.5M Co-op customers.

Why Multi-Site Businesses Need Tailored IT Support

As midmarket businesses expand across multiple locations, their IT needs evolve in complexity and scale. What works for a single-site operation often falls short in a distributed environment. In this blog, we explore why IT support for multi-site businesses requires a different approach, the common pain points these businesses face, and why choosing a local IT partner is a strategic advantage.

Navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Starting Point

To fully grasp the significance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it's essential to understand the three that came before it—each marking a transformative leap in how societies produce, work, and live.

MDR: What is it, and why is it so popular?

Events in 2025 have highlighted the catastrophic risks associated with cybercrime. Ransomware attacks on Marks & Spencer and the Co-Op are expected to have cost each company millions of pounds in losses and strongly impacted their reputations.

Why you should consider Zero-Trust IT Architecture in 2025

In an era where cyber threats are more sophisticated and persistent than ever, traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer sufficient. For midmarket businesses—often targeted for their valuable data and relatively lean security teams—adopting a Zero-Trust architecture is no longer optional. It’s a strategic imperative.

ChatGPT vs Copilot: What is the difference?

Note: this post is correct at time of writing (July 2025). AI is subject to rapid change so information in here may be out of date depending on the time in which you read it.