When a FTSE listed global financial services organisation pondered on the question if business process outsourcing could improve the delivery of its workplace services, the company’s CIO turned to Coeus Consulting for advice.
Facing a workplace services function that in the eyes of the CIO was “underperforming for several years” (including in areas such as customer satisfaction levels, responsiveness and technology maturity), the financial institution set out to explore how it could ramp up maturity in order to better serve the employees across its offices in multiple geographies.
One of the questions in the process was: should we deliver workplace services in-house or outsource the process to a specialist third party provider? To help guide this assessment, the Director of End User Services (workplace services) and the procurement team appointed Coeus Consulting to support.
Coeus Consulting kicked off its mandate with an assessment of the performance of the end user services, to identify the key areas of improvement and opportunities.
“We assessed whether services were sufficiently high quality and good value – or if it would be more efficient to source services from market providers. Our current state review processes covered the current operating model, financial breakdown, structure and head count, supplier / contract information, performance data, strategy documents and planned transformation initiatives,” said Coeus Consulting’s lead project manager on the engagement.
The assessment also took an external perspective, reviewing the key findings against industry domain models and best practices in the workplace services landscape.
“Our approach aligned the workplace services function to an industry model, which supported benchmarking against other similar sized organisations for cost and quality. In turn this was used to provide a market assessment and potential benefits of externally sourcing services. It delivered a clear evidence-based value assessment for the organisation.”
The result? A set of recommendations that included strategic options for the function, a cost benefit analysis, and actions to improve each sub service on quality and/or cost.
“Our industry knowledge and direct sourcing experience shone a light on potential sourcing options, their feasibility, the financial and non-financial benefits of each, and above all the correct sequencing of activities. This provided our client with the insight and guidance needed to decide whether they should outsource End User Services or focus primarily on internal delivery and service transformation.”
