Tech for engineering firms

Both, and the first one is where most providers fall over. Engineering software is unforgiving about graphics, memory and how fast it can read a file, so we spec workstations against the software you actually run rather than a generic office build, and we size storage and networking for model files rather than documents. If people are waiting on the machine, the licence you're paying for is the expensive part, not the hardware.

It depends on the size and the software, and we'll tell you which of the three answers applies to you rather than selling one. Sometimes it's proper file syncing with version control. Sometimes it's a remote desktop where the model never leaves the office and only the screen travels. Sometimes the honest answer is that a particular workflow belongs on site. What we won't do is pretend a synced folder over a home connection is fine when it isn't.

The useful version runs inside your own tenancy, on your own files, and doesn't train anyone else's model. Someone asks a plain question, it searches your drawings, calculations, specs and past reports, and comes back with an answer and the source document. Same for tenders, it drafts from your own past submissions. Nothing goes to a public tool unless you specifically decide it should, and an engineer signs anything technical before it leaves the building.

Yes, and it's becoming one of the more common reasons firms call us. Larger clients, councils and government agencies now want evidence of MFA, endpoint protection, patching, backups and an incident plan before they'll share their data with you. We check what you have against SMB1001, fix what's worth fixing, and fill the questionnaire in with you. After the first one it's largely a copy and paste job.

Partly, and it's worth doing before they retire. The technical half is straightforward: get the files off the server nobody documents and into somewhere structured, searchable and backed up. The AI half then makes that history answerable, so a question about how the firm handled something in 2019 gets a real answer instead of a hunt. It won't replace the judgement in that person's head, but it stops the firm losing the record along with them.

Managed IT is a fixed monthly fee per person covering helpdesk, monitoring, maintenance, backups and the security baseline. Workstations and storage are quoted separately because engineering specs vary so much. Automation is quoted per build against a fixed scope. Any number on a website would be made up, so the review costs nothing and you'll have real pricing before you decide anything.