A global leader in aerospace manufacturing, Gardner Aerospace has partnered with cloud and digital services provider ANS Group to help drive more effective business decisions using the low code Microsoft Power Platform.

Gardner Aerospace manufactures finished aerospace components in 5 countries with 9 sites and over 1,700 employees. To align their business goals across the organisation and establish secure governance, ANS has assisted Gardner with implementing the Microsoft Centre of Excellence (CoE) toolkit and a Managed Service for ongoing support. The Managed Service tier utilised by Gardner will also provide them with ANS functional engineering expertise to assist with developing applications and automations in the Power Platform.

The organisation already had some internal Power Platform experience but wanted to leverage ANS’ knowledge to upskill their employees and augment their internal capability. ANS has also helped Gardner with education around best practice governance and application lifecycle management with the ANS Protect service, which will help them understand and utilise the insights from the CoE toolkit. This enables Gardner to make more effective business decisions using the Power Platform moving forward.

Ian Warner, IT Director at Gardner Group Limited, said about their digital journey, “When looking into the CoE with ANS, we learned it was a complex configuration. The challenge with the CoE toolkit for Gardner was the lack of internal skills and knowledge of implementation. Utilising ANS’ experience meant we could implement the CoE toolkit with minimal impact on the business and without disrupting what was already in place. ANS configured the solution with zero disruption before taking us through a set of educational workshops to help us better understand our CoE and how to manage it internally.”

“The key is around governance and data security; we have got a number of people in different countries developing different solutions; this now means we have the framework in place and the governance around it to understand where our data is and can now control it, lowering any risk.”

ANS’ CTO Joe Wolski said: “We’re excited to be working with Gardner Aerospace and playing a part in their digital transformation journey. They recognise the value of education in innovation and upskilling their employees to build their solutions using automation. As an international company, governance over development is critical for managed growth, and Gardner Aerospace is taking steps to pave the way for further innovation across their company.”