Industry news

SQS signs £8 million Managed Services contract with Centrica

SQS Software Quality Systems AG has announced that it has signed a Managed Services contract worth £8 million with Centrica plc - the UK's leading integrated energy company.

Centrica has selected SQS to provide on and offshore testing, with a focus on raising quality and reducing risk within their business critical systems such as the Smart Metering programme, which is designed to be installed in over two million homes. The contract, which commences immediately, is worth £8 million over 12 months and will involve SQS providing end-to-end testing, from performance through to automated regression test suites, in an on and offshore model.

This contract represents a continuation of existing business volumes with Centrica. However, in signing a Managed Services contract for 12 months, Centrica has made a significantly longer commitment than the previous project-based contracts, resulting in improved revenue visibility for SQS.

David Cotterell, SQS Board Director, commented: "We are delighted that Centrica has extended its commitment to SQS, demonstrating the high value it places on partnering with a pure play, independent testing provider with a proven on and offshore presence. As well as providing greater revenue visibility this contract demonstrates the success of the ongoing strategic investment into our Managed Services business."

Sabio has won a contract to implement a customer contact centre infrastructure for Eurostar.

The contact centre specialist will apply Avaya Aura SIP-based technology platform that will allow the high speed rail service operator to integrate its call centre activities in London and Ashford.

Eurostar has nine million passengers a year and receives an average 1.2 million calls per annum. It also receives 85,000 customer interactions via e-mail and letter. The solution will support its current and anticipated future call volumes, and provide the flexibility to respond to heightened customer service demands at peak times or during periods of disruption.

The solution allows Eurostar's service staff to answer calls at both its Ashford or Central London sites, with the ability to switch traffic to either location as part of the company's broader disaster recovery plan.

Richard Thomas, Eurostar's chief technology officer said: “We needed to work with a contact centre specialist with a high level of Avaya solutions expertise, and a partner that could offer the local skills required to ensure Eurostar's demanding operations are fully resilient.

"Signing a long-term support contract with Sabio should ensure that the Eurostar customer experience team can rely on a best practice contact centre infrastructure to support our service operation."

Source: Call Centre Focus: http://www.callcentre.co.uk/ccf-news-content/full/sabio-wins-eurostar-contract

American online retailer Gilt Groupe is creating up to 200 jobs - 100 of which will be call centre roles in Limerick.

A Dublin operation will focus on software development with the contact centre due to open due to open in September.

Gilt Groupe provides invitation-only access to products and experiences at ‘insider prices’. It offers its members a selection of merchandise, including clothing, accessories and lifestyle items.

Source: Call Centre Focus: http://www.callcentre.co.uk/ccf-news-content/full/online-retailer-to-create-call-centre-jobs

Energy firm Centrica has signed a managed services contract worth £8m with SQS Software Quality Systems.

The firm has selected SQS, specialists in software testing and quality managed services, to provide on- and offshore testing, with a focus on reducing risk within its core business elements.

The 12-month contract commences immediately and is worth £8m. It will see SQS providing end-to-end testing, from performance through to automated regression test suites.

Centrica also announced that it extended its contract with IT services provider Fujitsu earlier this week, with a five-year infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) deal that will see Fujitsu refresh the company's desktop infrastructure to deliver access to new email and instant messaging solutions.

According to Fujitsu, the infrastructure can be scaled to meet Centrica's requirements going forward, and will support increased use of virtual clients and mobile devices.

Fujitsu's IaaS solution will be hosted using Fujitsu servers and storage in one of Fujitsu's UK datacentres.

"As Centrica grows both organically and through acquisition, the IT capabilities and support we provide to allow them to do their jobs are critical," said David Bickerton, group CIO at Centrica.

"Therefore our desktop services, which increasingly involve adoption of mobile devices, become ever more critical to the efficient running of our business and the IT experience we provide our people."

Source:http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2045126/centrica-signs-deals-revamp#ixzz1K97O9k1n

Company makes investment in social e-commerce

Wal-Mart has announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire, Kosmix, a social media site.

Kosmix, based in Mountain View, Calif., has developed a social media technology platform that filters and organizes content in social networks to connect people with real-time information that matters to them.

Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, early pioneers of online shopping, whose first company, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. The founders and the Kosmix team will operate as part of the newly formed @WalmartLabs and continue to be based in Silicon Valley.

Kosmix's innovative technology platform searches and analyzes connections in real-time data streams to deliver highly personalized insights to users. The platform powers TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events with more than five million visits last month; Kosmix.com, a site to discover social content by topic; and RightHealth, one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach.

"We are expanding our capabilities in today's rapidly growing social commerce environment," said Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart's vice chairman. "Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers' day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings."

"The world of social media is exploding and for millions of consumers their social connections matter hugely in their daily lives," said Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix. "Our work has focused on developing a social genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics, products and events as expressed through social media -- be it a feed, a tweet or a post. We are thrilled to join one of the world's largest companies and combine our work with Walmart's vast online and offline retail businesses."

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and the company anticipates it will close during the first half of this year.

Fujitsu has worked with Cardiff University to implement Salesforce.com rollouts for two of the university’s customer-facing departments - the Centre for Lifelong Learning and the Knowledge Transfer Centre.

These implementations enable significantly increased response times to potential customers for both departments, as well as a much-needed central point in which to track customer engagement.

The university’s Centre for Lifelong Learning sells professional certifications and part-time training courses to postgraduates, businesses and the public. The University had previously employed a spreadsheet-based, offline system to manage courses, making it difficult to quickly access and share information and providing staff with a limited view of the status of courses. This offline approach resulting in missed revenue generating opportunities.

To address these issues, Cardiff University identified a need for an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system, enlisting Fujitsu’s help in configuring and supporting a Salesforce.com deployment. For the Centre, Salesforce.com provides an integrated system for sharing data regarding course booking sales, delegates and trainers, ensuring all staff have online access to the same constantly evolving information. The system also facilitates comprehensive analysis of courses, helping to quickly identify course popularity.

The university’s Knowledge Transfer Centre (KTC) aims to enable businesses of Wales to gain access to the unique facilities and expertise that exist within the Cardiff School of Engineering, a subsidiary of Cardiff University.

The school required a robust way to capture and manage contact with businesses and government departments that may be interested in the research and innovation within the department. With no prior way to track conversations, business opportunities were being lost and multiple contact with the same companies occurring.

The Salesforce.com system offers comprehensive tracking and management of customer and client engagement, enabling the KTC to maintain company and contact records and attach records of specific engagement with each contact. By tracking conversations, the KTC could better measure the needs and outcomes of contact with target organisations from a single online hub that can be accessed by all staff.

Simon Parker, director, Knowledge Transfer Centre and Cardiff University, said: “Fujitsu’s advisors quickly understood our needs, converting these into simple enhancements to Salesforce.com, which we now use on a daily basis. Salesforce.com has since become invaluable in managing multiple simultaneous projects, ensuring we optimise our time in talking to companies and following leads.”

Mark Peplow, senior consultant at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, said: “Fujitsu prides itself on recognising and deploying the most effective and flexible solution in improving organisations’ efficiency, and quickly identified Salesforce.com as an ideal package for the University’s various requirements. We believe that many other higher education establishments can benefit from similar deployments.”

Fujitsu offers a range of services for business-critical applications. As well as CRM and cloud products such as Salesforce.com, Fujitsu also offers information management and application outsourcing services and works with leading providers such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

CGI Group, Inc. a leading provider of information technology and business process services, has announced the signing of a three-year, $3.1 million contract with the City of Ottawa to advise and assist the City in support of its Service Ottawa initiative and implementation of the City’s Five-Year Technology Roadmap.

When implemented, the City’s Service Ottawa initiative will fundamentally transform how residents receive City-supplied services. It is an approach to deliver consistent, predictable, high-quality information and services to Ottawa residents and to generate significant operational cost savings.

“We are very proud to have been selected by the City of Ottawa and to support them in this major transformational initiative”, said Alain Brisson, Senior Vice-President, National Capital Region, CGI. “We look forward to assisting the City in implementing its Five-Year Technology Roadmap and achieving the Service Ottawa objectives.”

The contract, with an initial term of three years, is for systems integration services that include subject matter experts and expertise required for the planning, definition, design, implementation, co-ordination, integration, testing, deployment, training, program and project management, and operational support associated with projects implemented under the auspices of the Service Ottawa initiative.

Accenture and The Hackett Group Supporting Universities’ Drive To Lower Costs and Boost Efficiency of Administrative Functions

Accenture and The Hackett Group has announced that they are working together to support the efforts of U.S. universities to reduce administrative costs and improve efficiency in response to ongoing financial and operational pressures. Recent joint work has included the following projects at:

•The Inter-University Council of Ohio (IUC) – The Institutional Excellence and Shared Services Assessment evaluates the functions of finance, human resources, IT, and procurement to identify opportunities to lower delivery costs, increase service effectiveness and lower operating risk. The project provides a collective assessment for the IUC and individual assessments for each of the IUC’s 14 member universities.

•Indiana University (IU) – A benchmarking assessment covers human resources, payroll, marketing and student services functions across the seven campuses in the IU system. An analysis of the physical plant’s financial operations at the Bloomington campus also has been conducted. Strategic recommendations have been developed to support IU efforts to increase operational efficiencies in response to budget pressures.

•Miami University – The Strategic Analysis of Support Services project will lead to a multi-year strategy to enable the university to increase organizational efficiency and achieve cost reductions in administrative and other support services without jeopardizing service levels essential to its mission and strategic goals.

•The University of Massachusetts – An assessment and benchmarking covering the procurement and accounts payable functions across the university’s five campuses provides recommendations for sustainable cost savings opportunities, improvements to purchasing tools and approaches to leverage the collective purchasing power of five campuses.

“Universities are under the same tough circumstances as most state and local governments, namely a widening gap between stagnant or slow-growing revenues alongside fast-growing expenditures needed to deliver core services,” said Dan London, North American managing director for Accenture’s Health & Public Service operating group. “Drawing on approaches that have proven widely successful in helping businesses streamline and become more efficient, educational institutions and systems have tremendous opportunities to make better use of scarce budget resources.”

According to The Hackett Group Global Benchmark Practice Leader Anthony Snowball, “The operational challenges universities face today are similar to those in the corporate world. Institutions must pay employees, manage suppliers, sustain complex IT infrastructure, and resolve issues around redundancy, standardization, and disparate technology platforms.

“These universities are to be commended for their commitment to excellence,” said Mr. Snowball. “They understand that they need to consider all options in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their business operations enabling them to better direct their resources toward their core missions of educating students and performing leading edge research.”

Contact Centre Steering Committee

Thursday 7th April

The NOA Contact Centre Steering Committee, chaired by Ria Barnabas, Recom, and Martyn Hart, NOA Chairman, continued its focus on the creation of best practice at the April meeting.

The steering committee has decided that the best way to promote contact centre best practice is to produce a NOA endorsed checklist.

Drawing on the experiences of the group, the checklist will help others avoid the potential pitfalls when outsourcing their contact centre functions.

The release and checklist will contain the following information:

• Press release – NOA checklist / Index information

• Statistics from The UK Customer Satisfaction Index to be used to emphasise the importance of the contact centre and produce an eye-catching headline / introduction. The 5 brands ranked top under Telecommunications and Utilities are all outsourced..

• Checklist

• Steering committee contributors mentioned in the release. NOA, sourcingfocus.com, end-users, suppliers and analysts. Credibility to the paper etc.

The checklist will be created from the follow list of contact centre considerations. Certain subjects will be split into sub-headings at the next steering committee.

Client Considerations

 Strategy – company’s endorsing outsourcing

 Clear responsibilities – is there a job description – how /where they fit in the organisation

 End User customer engagement – who is responsible in specifying (how do you know the end users’ needs)

 Governance model and mechanism for change

Client When Assessing Suppliers

 Communications (backup) / trust

 Escalation

 Capabilities (also region) (to develop with the business needs)

 Costs

 Innovation

 Security

 Application Support

 Agents

 End User Profile analysis and Fit

 Sustainability

 Transparency*

 Case Studies*

* added at the request of the steering committee.

Attendees included: Ria Barnabas – Recom, Martyn Hart – NOA, Brian Hannon – Conduit, Iain Banks – Response, Tina Stanley –Teleperformance, Will Allister – Aegis Global, Steve Feeney - Genesys Telecommunications, Paul Corrall – sourcingfocus.com

NOA Public Sector Steering Committee

Thursday 7th April

The Public Sector Steering Committee follows on from the NOA Public Sector events of 2010. The aim of the committee is to discuss and brainstorm "strategic lessons for successful outsourcing and shared services in the public sector."

The committee was chaired by Paul Robb, NOA Representative for Suppliers, who initiated the discussion with an overview of the public sector cost challenges and the ‘perfect storm’..

Public Sector Cost Challenge

• Public Sector survival in Austerity…

• CSR Average 19% reduction in Departmental spend (over 4 years)

• “I’m afraid there’s no money left..” Liam Byrne (to David Laws)

• Significant pressure on back and ‘middle’ office spend: transformation required

MoD – 8% over 4 years, back office cuts c.30%

Health Service ‘ring fenced’ – back office cuts c.25-30%

• HMIC: Level of cuts unprecedented in working lives of senior managers across police and wider public sector

• Land Registry: Fee income dropped 30% (year on year)

• £80bn + Public Sector spend on private / voluntary sector services

• One-third of Public Sector services outsourced

The Perfect Storm - Three power forces coming together…

• Technological – Cloud, web based apps

• Commercial – Lock in of legacy contracts, protracted procurement, adversarial approach, input-based approach

• Financial – Cash and capital rationing, once-in-a-generation cost pressure, labour arbitrage, ‘sweat the asset’ – not enough

• Public Sector to re-think the way it delivers services (non-core and core..)

• Outsource Industry to transform at all levels – or miss the boat..

Key Questions

• How can the Public Sector benefit from Private / Voluntary sector Involvement?

• What are the barriers to outsourcing and shared services?

• What changes are required?

- Public Sector

- Outsourcers

Steven Littlefair, Steria, said: “There seems to be a growing maturing in the public sector moving forward and huge opportunities and challenges are present. It is also hard not to generalise but there are vast levels of complexities in the sector.”

There are opportunities to encourage outsourcers to enter the UK market to require processing facilities and take over certain business centres with no redundancies.

Colin Cram, Marc1 Ltd, said: “Outsourcing back office issues can not solve budget issues as they provide only a small amount of public service functions. Outsourcing will have to become more frontline to reach the required savings.”

Barriers

Offshoring – Widespread public sector offshoring on the table? The traditional offshore destinations are now increasing in cost.

Security – Unfounded political and security concerns regarding data. Public concerns about national security and stigma with the security of offshoring public services.

Expectations – “The public sector can not simply set out the perimeters / constraints of an outsourcing contract with a supplier and expect the required cost savings.”

Red tape – There is a need to speed up the outsourcing process but it is hard with the public sector due to changing requirements

Advisory services – can be problematic and have their own interests at heart

Vision – The public sector needs a more streamlined and transparent strategic vision to reduce costs through outsourcing

Procurement process – Lengthy, expensive

Suggestions

• More collaborative outsourcing needed

Clive Parminter, Capgemini, said: “Shared services enable best practice within cuts. Councils sharing best services and even services should be used more to improve capability.”

• Outcome pricing maturity

• Streamlined procurement processes

Actions

• Committee to produce outsourcing recommendations / outsourcing benefits paper (Colin Cram to assist?) – Ongoing

• Next steering committee to be arranged by Events

Attendees included:

Paul Robb NOA Rep for Suppliers, KPMG

Paul Corrall sourcingfocus.com

Leslie Willcocks LSE

Mario DeVarges Bolton Council

Clive Parminter Capgemini

Rainer Majcen Arvato

Colin Cram Marc1 Ltd

John Callachan DDC Group

Steven Littlefair Steria

David Goldsmith Ventura

Bill Hull TLT

Michael Scott RPC

Will McAllister Aegis Global

Stuart Wilson National School of Government