Universal Music

Hayley Selby, International Head Of Image Management & Design

The Universal Music Group is the world’s number one music corporation with around 800,000 titles in its catalogue. Their record labels include Polydor, Island, Universal, Mercury and Decca. Also included in this mighty portfolio is Britannia, Europe’s largest mail order club for music and video.

Universal Music International is responsible for all the operations outside the US and Canada. We met Hayley Selby, its International Head Of Image Management & Design, at Universal’s impressive offices set in St James Square in SW1, to discuss how SupportPlan has worked for her. Hayley’s division is responsible for conceptualising the product, artworking it and transporting it around the world in time for the global release dates.

SupportPlan & Universal Music

They have forty Macs in Hayley’s department that are all used for design, content management and production processes. She explained, "It’s imperative for our Macs to be operational because we are accessing WAMnet, which is an enhanced ISDN." She continued, "We send out products around the world and if it doesn’t get there on time, it misses the release date. So if the support infrastructure from SupportPlan was not in place it would jeopardise these release dates." Hayley’s found that she doesn’t get the internal level of support required for a Mac environment, "Everyone else in these offices use PCs and so SupportPlan has really helped this division by giving us the support we’ve needed."

Universal has a technical support and maintenance contract with SupportPlan that covers every piece of equipment with four-hour response times. Hayley expands, "Most of our machines are swappable so if something has to go away for repair we get another piece of equipment from SupportPlan to replace it. This contract works harmoniously with the Pay As You Go points system that we also have for consultancy purposes. It covers research and development projects, like upgrading software and seeing if it will be compatible with the new system before we purchase it."

Hayley has been clearly impressed by SupportPlan's commitment to problem solving. She said, "There have been times when a piece of equipment has malfunctioned and an engineer has stayed here way over normal working hours to make sure that we’re up and running again."

SupportPlan Provides Solutions

The whole of Hayley’s division moved from several buildings to the current offices earlier this year. Hayley provided SupportPlan with a brief and she said, "They literally walked in at the weekend and when we came into work on Monday we switched on our machines and everything was up and running and ready. There were no problems." She added, "The most impressive thing is that I didn’t have to be there and I know for a fact that the other support companies could not have been left to do it." Hayley went on to confirm, "It’s down to the sheer competence of their engineers, the knowledge of our equipment and environment, and the fact that I’ve had a good relationship with the engineers, that lead me to completely hand over the office move to SupportPlan."

 

Hayley said that in the eight years that she’s been at Universal she’s had to change IT support companies three times prior to using SupportPlan. These other companies had all let her down very badly and had not maintained the level of support stated in their terms and conditions. Hayley finally stated, "My loyalty to SupportPlan has always been down to the fact that they provide what they promise."

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