Cognition360 helps high-growth MSP NexusTek achieve more with less

Now with more than 320 employees, NexusTek has grown rapidly to its current position as one of the top 25 MSPs worldwide. Just in the past year NexusTek has made five acquisitions – with a plan to leverage scale to achieve greater efficiencies in operations and a broader range of services to customers.

“Our business objective is simply to do more with less,” says NexusTek Director of Operations, Garrett Stephenson. “That means more and better quality service for our customers at less cost, making NexusTek more efficient and profitable.

“To achieve that goal, we have to be highly effective in welding together disparate managed services providers into a single, high-performing company. Fusing numerous organizations requires timely, accurate and consistent data to identify potential problems and areas that need improvement.”

NexusTek empowers small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in local markets across the U.S. and Canada with best-in-class IT solutions at an affordable price, and without complexity. Limited by neither geographic footprint nor technological acumen, NexusTek enables SMBs to access cloud and IT services otherwise available to only large enterprises.

For NexusTek, one pain point of note was producing reports from multiple instances of ConnectWise, which had proliferated following a number of acquisitions. Requiring accurate and consistent data, NexusTek sought out Cognition360 to learn more about its data warehouse and reporting platform.

“Cognition’s multi-tenanted data warehouse makes it possible for us to access and aggregate data from multiple instances of ConnectWise, which is critical to operations.

“After deploying Cognition360, we can now get timely insights across the whole business in near real-time, without complexity. This solution allows us to accomplish more in less time, while utilizing fewer resources. The ability to handle multiple instances of ConnectWise has also proved its worth in speeding the integration of new acquisitions”, Stephenson says.

Full and rapid visibility of data from new instances of ConnectWise means data from acquired companies can be quickly integrated without interrupting reporting consistency.

“Cognition’s multi-tenant data warehouse makes it possible for us to access and aggregate data from multiple instances of ConnectWise, which is critical to operations. After deploying Cognition360, we can now get timely insights across the whole business in near real time, without complexity. This solution allows us to do more in less time, while utilizing fewer resources.”

New areas of business improvement

Stephenson commented that the first applications of Cognition360 have been at the CEO and senior management level. Every Friday, Stephenson runs a progress meeting attended by all managers responsible for revenue.

“I trend how we’re tracking against our monthly revenue targets. Now we can immediately see an accurate account of how we’re progressing across key KPIs. Also of note is that while our reports have traditionally focused on supporting leaders in the business, we’re now able to empower front line staff with metrics around time entry quality, and ticket close rates.

“Cognition’s Time Entry Quality capability is particularly effective in helping our people see exactly how they’re performing against industry benchmarks,” said Stephenson.

Driving positive cultural change

“Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) bring opportunities,” Stephenson says. “Some employees excel with the change that comes with M&A, so giving people accurate and actionable data allows them to see how they’re doing and how to improve. This convenience and insight is having a very positive effect on our culture.”

While there have been direct cost savings from Cognition360 in reducing the manual reporting load, it is in areas such as revenue projection where NexusTek is truly making significant progress.

“We’re able to see new opportunities for enhancing processes, which allows us to increase revenue with fewer resources. That all flows from improved visibility,” Stephenson added. “For example, we’re working right now on a service desk staffing model, for which an important outcome is to forecast hiring requirements. Cognition360 makes that possible – but it’s not just the platform, the Cognition360 team has incredible knowledge of both ConnectWise and the business of managed IT services.”

Before adopting Cognition360, NexusTek used a variety of reporting tools including Brightgauge, ConnectWise Report Writer, and a myriad of spreadsheets. However, Stephenson notes that the need for accurate reporting across the multiple instances of ConnectWise made the decision to go with Cognition360 a no-brainer.

About NexusTek

Thousands of small and medium-sized U.S. businesses depend on NexusTek to manage and optimize their IT and cloud environments for business continuity, productivity, operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. With an all-encompassing services portfolio, infrastructure, high-touch personal attention and IT consulting expertise, NexusTek delivers true end-to-end, outsourced IT management to organizations nationwide. See: www.nexustek.com