Eliminate The Complexities Of Your IT System

There may have been times when you actually spent on the right IT system but didn’t have adequate expertise to instil the appropriate learning curve for your end users. Oftentimes, users find a new system too complicated and end up spending more hours familiarising with intricate processes than is economically acceptable.

There are also applications that are just too inherently sophisticated that, even after the period of familiarisation, a lot of time is still spent managing or even just using them. Therefore, at the end of each day, your administrators and users aren’t able to complete much business-related tasks.

The first scenario can be solved by providing adequate training and tech support. The second might require enhancements or, in extreme cases, an overhaul of the technology itself.

For instance, consider what happens right after the conclusion of a merger and acquisition (M&A). CIOs from both sides and their teams will have to work hard to bring disparate technologies together. The objective is to hide these complexities and allow customers, managers, suppliers and other stakeholders to get hold of relevant information with as little disruption as possible.

One solution would be to implement Data Warehousing, OLAP, and Business Intelligence (BI) technologies to handle extremely massive data and present them into usable information.

These are just some of the many scenarios where you’ll need our expertise to eliminate the complexities that can slow your operations down.

Here are some of the solutions and benefits we can offer when we start working with you:

  • Consolidated hardware, storage, applications, databases, and processes for easier and more efficient management at a fraction of the usual cost.
  • BI (Business Intelligence) technologies for improved quality of service and for your people, particularly your managers, to focus on making decisions and not just filtering out data.
  • Training, workshops, and discussions that provide a clear presentation of the inter-dependencies among applications, infrastructure, and the business processes they support.
  • Increased automation of various processes resulting in shorter administration time. This will free your administrators and allow them to shift their attention to innovative endeavours.

Find out how we can increase your efficiency even more:

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Outsourcing

Are you ready to outsource? Do you even need to outsource? We’ll help you answer those and other questions regarding outsourcing and your company.

Once we’ve determined that outsourcing will render your organisation more focused on your core competencies, more cost-effective, and more flexible, we’ll offer you the full spectrum of our services. Our specialists can assist you in every stage of the entire outsourcing life-cycle.

Starting from evaluating what can be outsourced, through finding the right outsourcing service provider, building the contract and agreements, getting everything in place, and managing the outsourcing relationship – we’ll be with you every step of the way.

Learn more about some of the outsourcing services we offer:

Outsourcing Contracts and Agreements

When an outsourcing project fails, both customer and service provider are quick to put the blame on the other party. But in most cases, the actual culprit was really just sitting there since day one – a poorly planned and implemented agreement.

We understand how costly and disruptive a failed outsourcing project can be for your business. That is why we put utmost attention to each contract and SLA (Service Level Agreement) that our customers enter into. This always reduces the likelihood of having unmet expectations, one of the major reasons why some outsourcing relationships fail.

We make sure that each agreement is fair, not only for our customers but also for the service providers themselves. Why? Because a disadvantaged provider will most likely end up delivering poor service as an offshoot of efforts to improve its profitability and ROI.

To accomplish this, we’ll thoroughly assess the infrastructure, resources, and expertise of your potential service provider to ensure they have the capability to meet your expectations. We’ll also make sure that their expectations are realistic and clear to you as well.

Here’s what you can expect from us when we start managing your outsourcing contracts and agreements:

  • A thorough assessment of your specific needs and the service provider’s profile to determine whether you have the right match before proceeding with any agreement.
  • Professional assistance when the time comes for you to discuss the scope of work, expected service levels, and when negotiating for appropriate pricing. We’ll also help you set up provisions for possible changes in the scope later on.
  • Expert counsel during drafting and finalisation of the contract and Service Level Agreements. Whenever applicable, we’ll help you propose penalties whenever service levels are not met and rewards when they are exceeded.
  • Regular reviews to determine whether everything agreed upon in the past, like pricing and service levels, are still realistic or competitive enough in view of current technological advancements and the prevailing social and economic environment.
  • Mediation expertise whenever the outsourcing project appears to be falling apart. We’ll work with you and the service provider to resolve conflicts and avoid the expensive exercise of having to terminate the contract. But if the best solution is to part ways, we’ll make sure you make an exit with the least disruption, missed opportunities and financial loss.

Application Outsourcing

I’m sure you’ve come to realise that to gain competitive advantage these days, you really need to invest in IT applications.

There are applications for enhancing your customer relationships, speeding up production, streamlining processes, advancing collaboration, protecting your systems from malware and many more. Selecting the right application, testing it, implementing it into your system, and then managing it can deviate resources which would have otherwise been used in other areas to build business value, increase profits, and enhance innovation.

Wouldn’t it be nice to unload yourself of the management processes which usually accompany IT applications? Actually, you can – through application outsourcing. Application outsourcing providers possess the expertise to either partially or fully assume responsibility of your IT applications.

Our job is to see to it that you link up with the provider who can best answer your needs. The overall proficiency of these providers spans both proprietary and opensource solutions, allowing them to cater to a wide range of preferences and budgetary limits. At the very least, they can provide professional support for well established applications.

If needed, they can develop applications for your organisation, taking charge of every step in the system development life-cycle: starting from system initiation, requirements analysis, through design, construction, acceptance and eventually to implementation.

Here are some of the benefits you can enjoy once we start managing your application outsourcing initiatives:

  • Freedom from time-consuming tasks such as installations, upgrades, configurations and repairs.
  • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).
  • 24/7 support from well-trained personnel. This can substantially cut downtimes caused by inexperienced troubleshooting.
  • The option to have your applications housed in more secure and reliable environments with much higher availability and much lower planned/unplanned downtimes.
  • Dedicated specialists who can focus on providing better regulatory compliance and risk mitigation initiatives.

Infrastructure Outsourcing

Keeping up with the competition nowadays usually requires technological advancements as well as the capability to manage and maintain the infrastructure that has to support them. These undertakings can suck your resources dry.

If you’re looking to reduce costs even while improving the performance of your networks, servers, databases, firewalls, desktops and mobile devices, you might want to consider IT infrastructure outsourcing among your top options. Infrastructure outsourcing service providers have the resources dedicated to a stable, secure, scalable and always available IT infrastructure.

Typical service provider facilities include data centrers equipped with high-speed networks, reliable power, dependable security, as well as provisions for upgrades, consolidation, disaster recovery, or even business continuity.

These providers employ specialists and staff who can manage and maintain all of these for you. While your provider juggles your core IT-related tasks, you can keep your eye on the ball and refocus on your company’s business goals.

Here are some of the benefits you can enjoy out of infrastructure outsourcing:

  • Freedom from time-consuming tasks such as installations, upgrades, configurations and repairs.
  • Since service providers, who are expected to have better horizontal and vertical scalability, will deal with the technological intricacies, your company’s strategic development initiatives can proceed unhampered.
  • Greatly reduced electricity expenses as a result of consolidation.
  • Easier, faster, cheaper, and more reliable disaster-recovery solutions through virtualisation.
  • Lesser risks of disruptions caused by power outages, cyber attacks, or Internet connection downtimes.

Business Process Outsourcing

With the sheer number of business processes your company has to attend to, it wouldn’t be surprising if you rarely have room to innovate.

Through business process outsourcing, we can free a considerable part of your financial and manpower resources which are currently focused on routine activities. With more resources to drive innovative initiatives, you’ll be able to accelerate production, improve customer service, enhance overall business value, and arrive at a stronger bottom line.

Some of the business processes that may be outsourced include data entry, finance and accounting, form processing, procurement, and HR, among others. If you’re interested in finding answers to the what, how, who, and where of BPO, specific to your organisation, we’ll be happy to enlighten you.

Here are some of the benefits you can enjoy once we start managing your BPO initiatives:

  • Professional guidance to ensure that your BPO undertakings will really result in substantial savings and significant improvements to your organisation’s business value.
  • Careful monitoring of service levels to ensure faster turnaround, accurate data, and high quality outputs.
  • Expert evaluation of information handling processes to guarantee full confidentiality.
  • Professional and unbiased management dedicated to establishing a strong, reliable, and fruitful relationship between you and your provider.
Without Desktop Virtualisation, you can’t attain True Business Continuity

Even if you’ve invested on virtualisation, off-site backup, redundancy, data replication, and other related technologies, I?m willing to bet your BC/DR program still lacks an important ingredient. I bet you’ve forgotten about your end users and their desktops.

Picture this. A major disaster strikes your city and brings your entire main site down. No problem. You’ve got all your data backed up on another site. You just need to connect to it and voila! you’ll be back up and running in no time.

Really?

Do you have PCs ready for your employees to use? Do those machines already have the necessary applications for working on your data? If you still have to install them, then that’s going to take a lot of precious time. When your users get a hold of those machines, will they be facing exactly the same interface that they’ve been used to?

If not, more time will be wasted as they try to familiarise themselves. By the time you’re able to declare ?business as usual?, you’ll have lost customer confidence (or even customers themselves), missed business opportunities, and dropped potential earnings.

That’s not going to happen with desktop virtualisation.

The beauty of?virtualisation

Virtualisation in general is a vital component in modern Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery strategies. For instance, by creating multiple copies of virtualised disks and implementing disk redundancy, your operations can continue even if a disk breaks down. Better yet, if you put copies on separate physical servers, then you can likewise continue even if a physical server breaks down.

You can take an even greater step by placing copies of those disks on an entirely separate geographical location so that if a disaster brings your entire main site down, you can still gain access to your data from the other site.

Because you’re essentially just dealing with files and not physical hardware, virtualisation makes the implementation of redundancy less costly, less tedious, greener, and more effective.

But virtualisation, when used for BC/DR, is mostly focused on the server side. As we’ve pointed out earlier in the article, server side BC/DR efforts are not enough. A significant share of business operations are also dependent on the client side.

Desktop virtualisation (DV) is very similar to server virtualisation. It comes with nearly the same kind of benefits too. That means, a virtualised desktop can be copied just like ordinary files. If you have a copy of a desktop, then you can easily use that if the active copy is destroyed.

In fact, if the PC on which the desktop is running becomes incapacitated, you can simply move to another machine, stream or install a copy of the virtualised desktop there, and get back into the action right away. If all your PCs are incapacitated after a disaster, rapid provisioning of your desktops will keep customers and stakeholders from waiting.

In addition to that, DV will enable your user interface to look like the one you had on your previous PC. This particular feature is actually very important to end users. You see, users normally have their own way of organising things on their desktops. The moment you put them in front of a desktop not their own, even if it has the same OS and the same set of applications, they?ll feel disoriented and won’t be able to perform optimally.

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What Heijunka is & How it Smooths Call Centre Production

The Japanese word Heijunka, pronounced hi-JUNE-kuh means ?levelling? in the sense of balancing workflows. It helps lean organizations shift priorities in the face of fluctuating customer demand. The goal is to have the entire operation working at the same pace throughout, by continuously adjusting the balance between predictability, flexibility, and stability to level out demand.

Henry Ford turned the American motor manufacturing industry upside down by mass-producing his iconic black motor cars on two separate production lines. In this photograph, body shells manufactured upstairs come down a ramp and drop onto a procession of cars almost ready to roll in 1913.

Smoothing Production in the Call Centre Industry

Call Centres work best in small teams, each with a supervisor to take over complex conversations. In the past, these tended to operate in silos with each group in semi-isolation representing a different set of clients. Calls came through to operators the instant the previous ones concluded. By the law of averages, inevitably one had more workload than the rest at a particular point in time as per this example.

Modern telecoms technology makes it possible to switch incoming lines to different call centre teams, provided these are multi-skilled. A central operator controls this manually by observing imbalanced workflows on a visual system called a Heijunka Box. The following example comes from a different industry, and highlights how eight teams share uneven demand for six products.

This departure from building handmade automobiles allowed Henry to move his workforce around to eliminate bottlenecks. For example, if rolls of seat leather arrived late he could send extra hands upstairs to speed up the work there, while simultaneously slowing chassis production. Ford had the further advantage of a virtual monopoly in the affordable car market. He made his cars at the rate that suited him best, with waiting lists extending for months.

A Modern, More Flexible Approach

Forces of open competition and the Six Sigma drive for as-close-to-zero defects dictates a more flexible approach, as embodied in this image published by the Six Sigma organisation. This represents an ideal state. In reality, one force usually has greater influence, for example decreasing stability enforces a more flexible approach.

Years ago, Japanese car manufacturer Toyota moved away from batching in favour of a more customer-centric approach, whereby buyers could customise orders from options held in stock for different variations of the same basic model. The most effective approach lies somewhere between Henry Ford?s inflexibility and Toyota?s openness, subject to the circumstances at the moment.

A Worked Factory Example

The following diagram suggests a practical Heijunka application in a factory producing three colours of identical hats. There are two machines for each option, one or both of which may be running. In the event of a large order for say blue hats, the company has the option of shifting some blue raw material to the red and green lines so to have the entire operation working at a similar rate.

Predictability, Flexibility, and Stability at Call Centre Service

The rate of incoming calls is a moving average characterised by spikes in demand. Since the caller has no knowledge whether high activity advisories are genuine, it is important to service them as quickly as possible. Lean process engineering provides technology to facilitate flexibility. Depending on individual circumstances, each call centre may have its own definition of what constitutes an acceptably stable situation.

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