Keeping 18 Veterinary Clinics Online: IT Support That Doesn't Interrupt Animal Care
How a multi-site veterinary group runs reliable workplace IT without an in-house army of technicians.
AniCura is one of Europe's largest veterinary networks — roughly 500 clinics across 15 countries, looking after 4.5 million-plus pets a year. The network entered Belgium in 2020 and kept expanding, reaching the 18 clinics I supported during the engagement. In a clinic, an IT outage isn't just an inconvenience — it directly delays consultations, surgical scheduling and emergency care. Over twenty-one months I delivered hands-on and remote support across the 18 sites with a workplace stack built on Microsoft Intune, Microsoft 365, TeamTel, Unify, CrowdStrike Falcon and 3CX, plus the diagnostic boundary where workplace IT meets veterinary medical imaging (Antech, DICOM, PACS-style exchange). Each clinic was followed and audited regularly in partnership with TeamTel (Zaventem). AniCura belongs to Mars Veterinary Health (~3,000 clinics and ~70,000 associates worldwide, alongside sister brands such as Banfield, BluePearl and Linnaeus), which made multi-country peer review — with IT counterparts in the Netherlands and Sweden — a natural part of the operating model.
Context
Eighteen clinics, three Belgian regions, three working languages, and clinical staff who can't sit and wait when something IT-related stops working. AniCura's Belgian footprint had grown quickly since the network entered the country in 2020, and the central support model needed someone on the ground able to combine daily ticket flow with vendor coordination across an unusually broad scope: workplace, network, telephony, security and veterinary diagnostic systems sharing the same clinic floor.
In a clinic, the IT stack and the medical stack sit next to each other. A laptop running Microsoft 365 is in the same consultation room as the imaging chain producing DICOM exams; the network operated by TeamTel carries both office traffic and the data leaving the diagnostic devices. That shared boundary is where multi-site veterinary IT actually lives.
The brief was straightforward: keep the 18 clinics operational, take the workplace plus diagnostic-boundary scope as one coherent ownership area, and keep the Belgian operating model aligned with the wider AniCura / Mars Veterinary Health network.
Approach
I held the role as a single Tier-1/Tier-2 support owner with a remit across all 18 sites. The day-to-day covered hardware, software, network, telephony and user support. Underneath that, the structuring work was about consistency: a shared Intune baseline across clinics, common 3CX templates for new sites and re-locating staff, and a single documentation approach for Unify communications setups so site-specific configurations could be read by someone other than the person who installed them.
Vendor coordination went beyond the workplace stack. TeamTel ran the per-clinic network; Dell supplied workstations and clinical-grade peripherals; Gobright handled the meeting-room and desk-booking layer; and Antech sat at the diagnostic boundary, where workplace IT meets the veterinary medical-imaging world (DICOM-formatted exams, PACS-style image exchange between clinics and reference labs). Each vendor had its own escalation path, its own firmware cadence and its own integration assumptions — keeping them aligned through one structured single point of contact on the AniCura side was a meaningful part of the role.
AniCura belongs to Mars Veterinary Health, the global veterinary-care arm of Mars. Day-to-day, that meant working alongside IT counterparts in the Netherlands and Sweden — comparing standards, sharing playbooks, and double-checking decisions before they hardened into Belgium-only quirks. Per-clinic site reviews ran in partnership with TeamTel (Zaventem), turning a generic 'how is your IT today?' into a structured walk-through across endpoint, network, telephony, collaboration and diagnostic imaging.
Key decisions
- Treat the workplace stack and the diagnostic boundary (DICOM imaging, Antech integration) as one coherent ownership area rather than two disconnected worlds.
- Keep Microsoft Intune as the single source of endpoint truth, with hardware, software inventory and security baseline aligned to one policy set.
- Run recurring per-clinic site reviews in partnership with TeamTel (Zaventem) — a structured walk-through covering endpoint, network, telephony, collaboration and diagnostic imaging.
- Compare and align Belgian decisions with AniCura peer IT teams in the Netherlands and Sweden so the local model stayed interoperable with the wider network.
Results
- →Workplace IT support delivered consistently across all 18 Belgian clinics over the 21-month engagement (September 2023 – June 2025).
- →Workplace and diagnostic-boundary scope (Antech, DICOM imaging, PACS-style exchange) operated as a single ownership area rather than two unrelated worlds.
- →Vendor stack — Microsoft Intune, Microsoft 365, TeamTel, Unify, CrowdStrike Falcon, 3CX, Dell, Gobright, Antech — coordinated through one structured single point of contact on the AniCura side.
- →Per-clinic reviews with TeamTel (Zaventem) institutionalised as a recurring operational rhythm rather than a one-off response to incidents.
- →Belgian operating model kept interoperable with AniCura peer IT teams in the Netherlands and Sweden through ongoing peer exchanges.
Lessons learned
- ▸In multi-site veterinary IT, the workplace stack and the clinical/diagnostic stack (DICOM, PACS, lab integrations) are one continuous problem on the clinic floor — treat them as such or live with the seams.
- ▸A best-of-breed stack only pays off when a single owner orchestrates it. With nine vendors involved (Intune, M365, TeamTel, Unify, CrowdStrike, 3CX, Dell, Gobright, Antech), the coordination layer is itself the structuring activity.
- ▸International peer review (NL/SE counterparts at AniCura) is a low-cost form of operational hygiene available to a multi-country group — useful before local choices crystallise.
- ▸Per-site recurring reviews done with a partner (TeamTel) tend to surface configuration questions earlier than waiting for a ticket cluster.
- ▸In healthcare environments — including veterinary care — IT availability is operational availability. The framing changes how the work is prioritised.
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