Endeavour Foundation is an independent, for-purpose organisation focused on making possibilities a reality for people with disability.
Established in 1951 in Queensland, Endeavour Foundation is now one of Australia’s largest disability service providers. It offers education, life-skills learning, employment opportunities, community access, in-home support and supported accommodation.
Endeavour Foundation initially engaged CBS (formerly Harbour IT) to overhaul their legacy IT systems and replace them with CBS’s Private Cloud solution, supported by Managed IT Services.
Since then, the engagement has become a successful long-term partnership spanning over a number of years with collaboration on a range of ICT projects.
After struggling with ageing on-premise infrastructure leading to daily outages and failing backups, Endeavour Foundation’s ICT department knew it was time to evolve.
In 2015, Endeavour Foundation engaged CBS to migrate most of their legacy systems to CloudMetro (CBS’s Private Cloud), with ongoing Managed Services and a roll out of Microsoft 365.
Since this first engagement, Endeavour Foundation and CBS have developed a true partnership, ranging from IT Infrastructure Management to IT staffing solutions at Endeavour Foundation’s regional locations.
Brendan, Executive General Manager of ICT for Endeavour Foundation, has worked closely with the team at CBS for over a year – meeting twice a month and receiving updates which he reports to Endeavour Foundation’s board.
“When I started with Endeavour Foundation in 2019, we already had a healthy relationship with CBS,” says Brendan. “We have a number of Tier 1 systems hosted in the CloudMetro environment, and we know there are reliable backups and recovery mechanisms.”
Brendan says that providing services under the NDIS means they are held to a very high standard in safeguarding customer data.
“CBS is also very proactive in helping us maintain our security posture. We store very sensitive information about our customers, and it’s essential to ensure it is well protected and managed.
“Endeavour Foundation rosters 2,000+ support workers who provide frontline support to people with a disability, and it’s a very diverse workforce, so our systems are crucial in helping us manage this effectively.
“We also operate 120 residential home locations for customers, and the data we collect is paramount to our ability to provide proper care. This data is centralised in our digital systems, so that’s where our team and CBS come into play–together, we maintain those systems and make sure they’re available so our people can provide the best possible service.”
Brendan Klasen, General Manager of ICT, Endeavour Foundation
With modern and reliable IT infrastructure in place, Endeavour Foundation has begun to explore new technology innovations that will deliver valuable time and cost savings to the organisation. CBS is well placed to support Endeavour Foundation as they progress on their digital transformation journey.
Across the past 12 months, the teams have worked together on several projects, including a pilot for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with CBS.
“Automating manual, time-consuming and repetitive processes is a key goal for our organisation because it will allow us to save substantial resource hours.
“We formulated a concept for a process owned by one of our service delivery teams and put it to CBS. They agreed it was a prime candidate to explore, test and validate an automated solution. It’s been a lot of work to get it across the line, but it’s now ready to be pushed into production.”
“RPA is very exciting from a business perspective, but also because it liberates staff to focus on more interesting and value-adding work.”
Of working with CBS, Brendan says they have been genuine partners to Endeavour Foundation in more ways than one.
“As a non-profit assisting people with an intellectual disability, CBS have been prime sponsors of a number of our events – not just financially but actually getting involved on the ground at our fundraising activities.
“Everyone here is very appreciative of the support they offer beyond the provision of ICT and their demonstrated willingness to get behind our mission and purpose.”
“We have a complex IT environment, so we’re looking to simplify this and also improve network connectivity for our 220+ physical sites across the eastern seaboard.
“We see external partners such as CBS playing a key role in helping us to consolidate and streamline our entire ICT infrastructure moving forward. We also foresee many more RPA projects once the current one is in full operation, so we can free up more staff to focus on work that directly impacts our customers.”
