Industry news

IBM has finalised the purchase of Kenexa who provide HR services and applications for $1.3 billion USD.

The Pennsylvanian based company provides HR applications designed to streamline services and allow for automation in areas such as performance management and recruitment.

The acquisition began in August and has been undertaken in order to provide IBM with the ability to enhance current services through integration with Kenexa applications.

BT have released details of a drop of rental rates of ultra-fast fibre optic broadband, charging rental rates of £38 rather than £60 per month for use of its cable infrastructure.

The new price will be introduced from June 2013 and comes after the telecommunications giant face heavy criticism for low fibre uptake compared to the rest of Europe.

Mike Galvin, Managing Director NGA at BT Openreach described the planned cost cut, saying: “It is now time for us to focus further on FTTP and I am pleased to say that we are making it more affordable than ever. I am sure that small businesses will welcome this major price cut and I am also sure that our fibre on demand plans will be of great interest.”

The NHS Commissioning Board (NHS CB) is looking to outsource GP IT services to third-party suppliers.

Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) will decide what services are provided by local suppliers and what services are delivered internally.

The new procurement system will come into place by April 2013 when the CCGs take control of the commissioning of services. The G-Cloud is expected to feature heavily in future procurement processes, being already employed to source e-mail providers for the NHS.

IT services giant Atos has invested in an Indian wind farm in order to offset carbon emissions generated by services and data centres.

The move comes as Atos seeks to halve its carbon footprint of 170, 000 tonnes by 2015. The move co-insides with reducing power usage across the company and developing modern green facilities.

Atos corporate social responsibility executive Phillipe Mareine said that: "To become a zero carbon company, Atos strives to improve carbon performance in all areas of its activities," adding that, "In this respect, we have launched many initiatives including remote working, zero email, building energy management, and carbon audits.

A range of new cyber security measures have been announced by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude including the creation of a new ‘Cyber Reserve’ force.

In a statement to parliament Maude detailed the creation of the force consisting of different nationalities and skill sets organised under the MoD to combat IT security threats.

The planned creation of a new UK National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was also revealed, designed to co-ordinate responses to security events and threats.

US private equity house Leonard Green & Partners have entered into talks with business entrepreneur Sir Philip Green to acquire at 25 percent stake of Topshop for £250 million.

Topshop is part of a group of businesses including Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge which makes up the Arcadia empire owned by Sir Philip.

Sources in retail have speculated that the deal could be confirmed by as soon as Thursday thisweek.

New cuts to be initiated by George Osborne are likely to result in the cutting of over 13,000 jobs within the civil service.

The predictions come on top of 63,000 positions cut from 2010 in order to reduce cost and safeguard funding for frontline services and economic stimulation projects.

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that the loss of 730,000 public sector jobs by 2017 will be outweighed by the creation of £1.3 million job in the private sector.

Digital telecommunications company Qualcomm has invested £74 million in Japanese firm Sharp to develop low-power displays for mobile devices.

The first half of the total investment will be transferred at the end of this year, with the remaining investment being delivered based on the success of joint development.

The new display technology would fit in a gap between e-paper screens and LCD in terms of quality and power usage. The invest comes when Sharp is projecting losses of $5.6 billion for 2012

Welcome to the next in the series of Sourcing Specialist blog posts – this time, Alun Morris, Sourcing Consultant at Wax Digital offers advice on buying professional services and getting the skills you need at the right price.

The breadth of professional services required by an organisation can be a real sourcing challenge. Sourcing people and services needs to be handled differently to sourcing products so it is imperative to be clear about the type of service you need, and consider what you are prepared to pay.

Procurement needs to focus on the requirement, internal process, business objective, market structure and competition, supplier compatibility, best value and price. Achieving best price however, is not the core objective here, so determining the actual need for the service and how it can best be fulfilled, before embarking on the procurement project is essential.

The end users requirements must be taken into account, but a category management approach from the procurement team is also required to ensure that the right service is purchased at the right price. If there is a specialist need or overriding business case this should also factor, however preparation, planning and understanding – on both sides of the fence (procurement and the end-user) is a must.

Clarifying precisely the types of people required to deliver the services, in terms of qualifications and experience, ensures that tender responses remain focused on your needs be it strategic consultancy or practical project management. Even once you have defined these core sourcing criteria and have a watertight brief you should be ready for a variance in your suppliers’ approaches to tender responses. No two service organisations are the same and innovative pricing and service delivery will be on offer as the basis of good value, so it is critical to have a clear understanding of the core cost drivers and associated overheads as your benchmarks.

It’s also important when in-sourcing or out-sourcing to be able to measure value against realistic internal delivery costs. Before you start this process have you evaluated how much it would cost your organisation to do the same job in-house?

Sourcing professional services is a significantly different ballgame to products so prepare yourself for a greater variety of options and making choices based not only on best value but also on the best fit for your type of organisation.

Welcome to the last in the series of Sourcing Specialist blog posts – this time, Alun Morris, Sourcing Consultant at Wax Digital takes a look at the recruitment process and offers advice on ensuring you find the best staff at the right price…..

We often hear the mantra ‘An organisations’ greatest asset is its people’ so getting the recruitment process right is essential to maintaining your assets. However, recruiting the right people and skills from a number of different recruitment specialists can be a complex, time-consuming and costly process.

As with professional services which I covered in my last post, recruitment agencies offer scales of difference in approach, quality and scope of coverage. There are both hard and soft factors to consider as part of the decision along with many different types of supplier, from regional and role specialists to one-stop staffing and recruitment experts. Your specific requirements may not be met by a single provider or even numerous competing ones. Let’s not forget that internet based recruitment is now seen as the mainstay of this industry sector. You will undoubtedly need a portfolio of providers and remember that being a preferred customer will put you top of mind with recruitment consultants and agencies.

Whatever your recruitment requirements – temporary labour, contingency recruitment of permanent staff, full recruitment campaigns or specialist search services, you need to establish how your pool of suppliers provide overall best value in price to performance ratio?

With recruitment outsourcing it’s also important to consider if a more comprehensive, if expensive, candidate vetting service offers you better value overall? Softer factors should also be considered, such as the power of the agencies brand to draw the right calibre of candidates for your organisation. The ultimate cost of recruiting the wrong people through poor supplier selection or a limited candidate pool could greatly increase your costs rather than reduce them. The impact on business performance can be debilitating.

The eventual choice of recruitment of your preferred suppliers should also be clearly governed by common terms and conditions including role banding, pricing structures and SLAs, and of course must be recruiting in line with fully up to date employment law.

People may be an organisations’ biggest asset but recruiting the right people can also be one of the biggest challenges in aligning internal processes and external service providers to meet those business objectives.

To find out more about this and other sourcing categories, please visit this online guide to the subject.