MESSENGE R THE June 2009 Piers Linney Simon Newton WE ARE NOW OUTSOURCERY. IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING AND TO BE FRANK IT HAS NOT COME A MOMENT TOO SOON AS THE OLD NAME AND LEGACY REPUTATION HAVE INCREASINGLY HELD THE BUSINESS BACK. We’ve said it before, but it is important that everyone understands that this is a new start for a new, exciting and market leading business. It’s far more than a new name and logo and our brand values will impact everything we do. It has taken a lot of research, time and debate to distil the new brand from the vision we have for Outsourcery. The blogs on culture and the office were interesting reads and (almost) every point raised in the culture blog has been discussed. We have taken the comments on board and intend to get together with groups to discuss them further. Now that we have the new brand, we can press on with looking at the Bury office refresh and we’re organising other group sessions to discuss ideas for the fit out. Work has started on our new London office which will be our flagship HQ given the market potential within the M25. As we have been telling quite a few people recently, although we need structure, we are absolutely not interested in hierarchy when it comes to good ideas. If you are aware of an issue that is impacting the business or have a serious idea that could improve the way we work or our customer service and your feedback isn’t getting the airtime it deserves, then let us know and we’ll pick it up. We’ve won some great new business during the month and the IT team have delivered several projects. The brand launch is a big project in itself and the marketing team has put a huge amount of work in to it. We can’t wait until the 8th July and we want Outsourcery to become a company we can all be proud of and one where we can all contribute. Over the next few weeks, please ask yourself how you are going to change Outsourcery for good. PIERS & SIMON
Transcript
MESSENGERTHE
June 2009
Piers Linney Simon Newton
WE ARE NOW OUTSOURCERY.IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING AND TO BE FRANK IT HAS NOT COME A MOMENT TOO SOON AS THE OLD NAME AND LEGACY REPUTATION HAVE INCREASINGLY HELD THE BUSINESS BACK.
We’ve said it before, but it is important that everyone understands that this is a new start for a new, exciting and market leading business. It’s far more than a new name and logo and our brand values will impact everything we do. It has taken a lot of research, time and debate to distil the new brand from the vision we have for Outsourcery.
The blogs on culture and the office were interesting reads and (almost) every point raised in the culture blog has been discussed. We have taken the comments on board and intend to get together with groups to discuss them further. Now that we have the new brand, we can press on with looking at the Bury office refresh and we’re organising other group sessions to discuss ideas for the fit out. Work has started on our new London office which will be our flagship HQ given the market potential within the M25.
As we have been telling quite a few people recently, although we need structure, we are absolutely not interested in hierarchy when it comes to good ideas. If you are aware of an issue that is impacting the business or have a serious idea that could improve the way we work or our customer service and your feedback isn’t getting the airtime it deserves, then let us know and we’ll pick it up.
We’ve won some great new business during the month and the IT team have delivered several projects. The brand launch is a big project in itself and the marketing team has put a huge amount of work in to it. We can’t wait until the 8th July and we want Outsourcery to become a company we can all be proud of and one where we can all contribute.
Over the next few weeks, please ask yourself how you are going to change Outsourcery for good.
PIERS & SIMON
June 2009THE MESSENGER
COMMERCIAL & PURCHASING UPDATETHE COMMERCIAL TEAM HAS CONTINUED TO ACHIEVE SLA’S FOR BOTH REPORTING AND APPROVALS, DEMONSTRATING THE HIGH LEVEL OF COMMITMENT ACROSS THE TEAM.
With the transfer of the remaining Servelogic and Increase customers, and the integration of the Genesis Sheffield base gathering pace, production of accurate and timely management reporting is as important as ever.
Working alongside Finance and Sales, a new series of commission schemes has been agreed, to drive the performance required by the business, whilst ensuring individuals are motivated and fairly rewarded for the work they do.
After the launch of the new brand Purchasing has been busy working with Marketing to get everything ready for the external launch. This has involved obtaining quotes and proofs on all of our stationery (contracts, letterheads etc.) and signage.
Purchasing have finalised the pricing and spec for the fit out of London office and awarded the order to our preferred contractor. The office is expected to be ready by mid August. We have also started to engage with contractors regarding the fit out of Bury and Leicester. We have passed on your feedback from the Blog and we hope to be able to arrange presentations from the contractors in July. Members of the staff forum will be invited to the presentations so that you are able to have an input into your working environment. The blog is still available on iGen so please feel free to add any suggestions you may have.
ANDY WILFORD
MARKETING UPDATEAS YOU CAN IMAGINE, THE MARKETING TEAM HAS SPENT MOST OF JUNE WORKING ON RE-BRAND ACTIVITIES IN READINESS FOR THE EXTERNAL LAUNCH ON 8TH JULY.
Since the internal reveal, we’ve been working on updating the Sales Guide, all the documents on the website, the intranet, PC wallpaper, Word and PowerPoint templates, posters, stationery, sales literature, printed folders, merchandise and the new version of The Messenger!
Time has been spent planning the customer, supplier and reseller launch communications and working with all departments and the Leicester web team to update the website in time for the launch. Soon after this our customers will receive The Source, formerly known as The Gen, so we’ve been writing the copy and working with our creative agency to develop new ideas.
In between all this we’ve continued to send email bulletins to communicate important information to our business partners. As well as sending out the second letters and emails announcing our move to e-billing and an email to prospects promoting our new CRM packages.
We’ve organised an open forum event for Sheffield customers in Manchester and secured a speaker slot and stand at the 4VCO Showcase, where Adam Spurr gave a presentation. Plus we’ve worked with our four PR agencies to produce a variety of print and online press releases to launch our new brand to the media.
We also welcome Asam Aslam, our new Online Marketing Specialist who will be working to make sure our website and our online marketing bring maximum return on investment.
LAURA MILLS ASAM ASLAM, ONLINE MARKETING GURU
STEVE PONDERING THE REBRAND
June 2009THE MESSENGER
FINANCE & CREDIT CONTROL UPDATEJUNE HAS BEEN A MONTH OF PLANNING FOR THE FINANCE TEAM, IN TERMS OF THE REBRAND AND THE INTEGRATION OF THE ACCOUNTS PAYABLE FUNCTION IN SHEFFIELD, ALL GOING LIVE IN JULY.
From the 1st of July, Bury will process and pay all Sheffield supplier invoices, adding to the centralisation of all purchasing already in place. Communications have been issued to all Sheffield suppliers advising them of these changes.
The expense policy review is making good progress. We’ve issued an interim Professional Services policy and the first draft of the new standard expense form has been issued to various users for feedback, whilst we continue to review policy itself.
May has seen good growth in our Hosted business - Hosted and Professional Services revenue has increased threefold in the last 4 months. In July we will kick off the reforecast process to reflect all the recent changes in the business.
Credit Control continues to focus heavily on clearing Aged Debt with the aim of no debt over 30 days, except for accounts ‘in query’ or on a payment plan. To date, DTS have collected c£100k of debt previously been written off. Testing continues on the DataCash project and recruitment is also underway to ensure Credit Control is equipped to deal with the new accounts heading our way due to the Sheffield customer migration.
Sean Owen’s team are helping us to match data in the Experian Ledger 360 Database to enable accurate reporting on credit limits which will inevitably reduce bad debt risk – Thanks guys.
Well done to Chris Borbin for passing three of his foundation CIMA exams!
HELEN ESNER & GAIL COUNSEL
HR UPDATE‘CHANGE OUR CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT FOR GOOD’
Following the internal brand launch you had the opportunity to feedback your views and thoughts in a Blog about what you would like to change in our office environment and our culture. You have now been invited to volunteer to be part of companywide teams who will drive the change in the office upgrade and culture. So, if you’re passionate about our environment or our company culture, please take this opportunity be part of the change.
During June we finalised all Institute of Customer Service Applications and will be contacting all participants in July to begin their journey towards achieving customer service.
Derrick has continued to keep the business up to date with changes to our Hosted packages through delivering updates to Customer Operations and Sales on Hosted Exchange, SharePoint and CRM. During these sessions people also had an insight into new products such as StoreSafe and Scribe.
The Learning Library has had many new additions over the past few months including the ’60 minute’ audio CD of Stephen Covey’s award winning book ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. This talks about how to negotiate and communicate effectively towards ‘win win’ solutions. As it’s an audio CD you could listen to the whole CD during your journey to and from work or over your lunch and break times. If you are looking to improve your skills to support you in your role then check out the whole Learning Library content via iGen.
Congratulations go to Liz and Alastair Ralph on the arrival of their new baby girl Eliana Poppy weighing in at 8lb 10 ozs.
JULIE GRUNDY
MARTA, DEEP IN THOUGHT
SHIRLEY, CHANGING WORK FOR GOOD
June 2009THE MESSENGER
OPERATIONS UPDATEWORK ON THE HIGHGATE INTEGRATION PROJECT HAS REALLY GATHERED PACE DURING JUNE AND THE CUSTOMER TRIAL FOR HIGHGATE IS PROCEEDING VERY WELL.
Led by Caroline Wells and working closely with Sheffield we have been able to select 20+ customers, equating to some 1300 MPN’s. These customers have received a letter to let them know we are moving them our systems and support in Bury. Vodafone have given us direct access to the Sheffield network. Many thanks to Linda Blatt for being the “guinea pig” to test the processes and prove our “short cuts” have worked. Also thanks to Stuart Lloyd and Mark Corlett for supporting the manual data entry on a Saturday and thanks to all the volunteers for coming in to enter the data on Saturday, despite the sunny weather.
The new products continue to gather momentum, with all of the Choice team having now undergone Control Panel training. We are confident all this hard work will soon pay off with our Choice partners, and we will really start seeing some traction by way of sales.
Having spent considerable time up-skilling the customer services team we are now in a position to remove the second layer of our IVR. So customers calling into Genesis will be offered a number of options and on choosing one of those options will go straight to a person. All inbound Leicester calls are also now going via first line support. This leaves the Leicester team dealing with the more in depth technical issues and offers more resource to build dedicated servers. Good news for the business and of course most importantly great news for our customers!
COLIN BELL
IT UPDATEJUNE HAS BEEN ANOTHER BUSY MONTH FOR THE IT DEPARTMENT. The new Storage Area Network (SAN) project has progressed well, and all of the Odyssey systems have been transferred onto it by Gary’s team.
Project Highgate, managed by Tony Gibson, has been a key focus for a lot of people in IT and across the business. Preparation is in place to migrate 20 customers into Oracle and manage them from Bury starting in July.
Neil Merton and Paul Pounder have done a sterling job to develop an order portal for United Utilities United Utilities. This provides a much improved interface for UU employees to buy, upgrade and replace mobile handsets and tariffs, and is due to go live internally at UU in July.
In addition Ben Lee has developed our iGen intranet to have external facing options so documents can now easily be shared between Sheffield and Bury without having to send emails.
A number of projects have started to support the Unified Communications product launch, led by Ross Broady. This involves linking a Broadsoft VOIP platform with our hosted Office Communications Server (OCS) application to provide click-to-call and capability. Jason and his team in Leicester are providing the technical knowhow and we plan to have a demo up and running for July.
The new London office is to be prepared with our Voice Over IP (VOIP) solution from the outset and this is planned to be in place by the end of July August.
In conjunction with pre-sales, we are working on improving the capability for sales to conduct CRM demos. Roll out starts the last week of June.
PETE WILLIAMSBEN LEE ARRIVING IN
HIS BIKE GEAR
RICHARD HOLLAND CATALOGUE MODEL EXTRAORDINAIRE
June 2009THE MESSENGERPRODUCT TEAM UPDATEWE’VE LAUNCHED OUR NEW MARKET LEADING CORE EXCHANGE, SHAREPOINT AND CRM PACKAGES. THANKS TO ALL WHO HELPED WITH THE LAUNCH!
We are also developing Advanced CRM Support, Professional Services, re-assessing MailSafe and Web Services, watch out for more changes soon.
Work on our new hosted VoIP product is underway with project team engagement kicking off with a workshop on 3rd July. In the meantime we have been working with inTechnology to define our product. We have been working hard to get CRM Scribe, a product that enables customers to integrate and move data from existing databases to hosted CRM, finalised for launch on 6th July.
On the Mobile network side, we have introduced the EU Legislation changes from O2 and Vodafone in simplifying roaming charges and new SMS notification service. We also launched out the new BES 5.0 software for BlackBerry.We’ve worked with Adam Cathcart’s team to launch the new SaaS pricing for 1st July, and to define some incentives that will help drive sales over the coming months.
We welcome Iain Law who will be helping to ensure that new and existing products are delivered more efficiently with fewer lose ends leading to greater customer satisfaction.
Our product strategy and the recent rebrand has been designed to transform our exciting business into Europe’s leading Cloud based Unified Communications provider.
Launching these new hosted products and the future Unified Communications products due to be launched soon will enable us to achieve this grand ambition.
MARK SEEMANN
INTRODUCTION TO THE CRM TEAMIT’S THE MISSION OF THE TEAM TO HELP OUR CUSTOMERS BECOME ADDICTED TO OUR CRM SOLUTIONS, SO THEY GET THE BEST POSSIBLE RETURN ON INVESTMENT.
Outsourcery’s CRM team, which was boosted with the acquisition of Increase CRM in March, includes some real CRM heroes who are all Microsoft CRM certified professionals:
• WAYNE ALEXANDER - Technical Support Executive - CRM, provides superhuman support to all our customers’ CRM users and CRM configuration and customisation services
• DAN BARBER - Senior CRM Consultant, provides expert CRM analysis services on our larger CRM projects including Premier Medical Group
• NEIL BENSON - Head of CRM Professional Services – runs our larger CRM projects and keeps the CRM team addictive• CHECK MA - CRM Support Engineer, provides heavy-duty support for our hosted CRM platform which is being
moved from Rackspace’s data centre to the Outsourcery data centre in Leicester• WEI CHIEH SOON - CRM Developer, extends our customers’ CRM systems using his cutting-edge customisation
and custom development expertise.The CRM team are working on a number of CRM implementation projects, including several 4-day Quick Start projects sold by the Sales team recently. We’re also working on several internal initiatives to improve our support systems and service levels, get smarter at recording our professional services effort, and beef up our Microsoft skills.
We’re really excited about the new branding which will help us integrate the CRM team into the new company, and about the new London office which will finally give us a world-class office from which to support our customers.
NEIL BENSON
IAIN LAW PROCESSING PROCESSES
NEIL BENSON CRM ADDICT
June 2009THE MESSENGERSALES UPDATEOUR CRM PIPELINE CONTINUES TO INCREASE WITH 2,090 SEATS & 352 PROFESSIONAL SERVICE DAYS IN THE PIPELINE.
The SAM team continue to secure some larger contracts with the most recent win Working Links, initially valued at over 250k in professional services and Certified Software Advisor bonus, with ongoing negotiations for a dedicated platform, 1200 Mobiles and a VoIP roll out.
The Affinity Partnership with Countrywide is well underway. We have received 54 voice connections which are currently being processed, with a further 100 connections expected in the next two weeks. There are some exciting potential Affinity partnerships in the Pipeline – Pall Ex, Tenon & Bigland Equestrian.
The Indirect team are looking good for a strong performance in June with 383 set to connect so far of which 183 are Voice and Blackberry.
The London City team attended a 4VCO event in London on 25th June. There were 100 delegates attended from the Private Equity sector. It was a very successful day, Piers & Mark Smith’s presentation was well received and a number of business opportunities were generated.
Internal Sales have connected 16 seats of CRM so far this month, the most the team has connected ever. The new qualifying approach along with closer united team process from initial contact, to commitment, to demo, to close, has received a positive response. Internal Sales have also planned a Dynamics prospecting day for July with help from Jason Nash, David Brown & Mark Gambarota of Microsoft which we are very excited about!
ABOUT THE PROJECTRajeev Arya, Executive Director of Finance and Technology Director for Working Links has selected specialist communications and hosted IT provider, Outsourcery, to provide a range of services including Hosted CRM, SharePoint, Professional Services and consultancy for their Long Term Strategic Technology Program. Working Links was formed in 2000 to address the challenges faced by the long-term unemployed and help them back into sustainable work. Initially the shareholders were the Government through the Shareholder Executive, Cap Gemini and Manpower. Working Links currently have circa 1500 employees and 140 offices in the UK and are heavily involved in the new Government FND (Flexible New Deal) programme.
Flexible New Deal will replace the current mandatory New Deal. This includes Private Sector Led New Deal, Employment Zone, New Deal 50plus and New Deal for Musicians contracts in October 2009. Flexible New Deal will be a four-stage programme with Jobcentre Plus delivering stages one to three. Successful providers (Prime Contractors) awarded flexible New Deal contracts will deliver stage four. The clients eligible for flexible New Deal will have been claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) for 12 months. Flexible New Deal will focus on improving skills and helping customers into sustained employment. The Department for Work and Pensions will pay 80% of the contract budget to providers on achievement of sustained job outcomes at 13 weeks and at 26 weeks.
Working Links have identified that to successfully deliver the FND contracts the internal and external management of candidates needs to be improved with the use of a robust CRM system. Microsoft Dynamics has been identified as the CRM system of choice which will allow them to manage existing contracts and future contracts as part of the FND programme. The FND programme is set to start on 5th October 2009 and Outsourcery will be providing an Agile project methodology to deliver the system within 16 weeks.
Working Links intends to utilise Outsourcery’s scalable Hosted CRM platform to deliver development and training instances of CRM in preparation for a full scale rollout. Outsourcery will work in conjunction with Working Links to design, customise and deliver the CRM system to 1500 end users. The project will involve complex integration with third party software and business critical applications.
ADAM SPURR
CONTRACT VALUE:• £1.37M for Microsoft Software,• 250 Days of Professional Services,• 50 Seats of Hosted Dynamics CRM
o £726,000 for Microsoft Dynamics Licenses of which Outsourcery can claim a CSA Fee (Certified Software Advisor)
o £288,000 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Servero The remainder made up with Microsoft Office Licensingo Total Professional Services Order Value of £197,728
FUTURE PROJECTS : • 1200 Mobile Voice from Orange, 900 Mobile Broadband • Dedicated Hosting Platform for the Microsoft Software
• Disaster Security and Storage Solution, • Remote working and Branch Communications services
