How we used OPEX improvements to renew MSP programme strength

In a study from Accenture, 75% of HR executives say that ensuring their operating model provides a competitive advantage is a major challenge

Our global investment banking customer had over $300M in CW & SOW spend with MSP operations in US, EMEA, and APAC.

They faced challenges within their programme attributed to governance, data quality and an outdated organisational structure – which was all attributing to a lack of consistency, quality and speed across the global programme.

To address our customer’s issues, our OPEX team decided on a full programme assessment that allowed them to settle on five opportunities of improvement:

• Lack of global governance
• Improvement of the escalation plans
• Poor data integrity of the VMS
• Limited non-VMS tech being utilised to better enable processes
• Outdated organisation structure not aligned to customer value-drivers

After the completion of the assessment, our OPEX team consulted and led the customer through our OPEX toolkit.

This includes the use of LEAN methodology and our transformation approach of discovery, design, implementation, and finally stabilisation of several new solutions to improve operations within the MSP programme.

In addition to these improvements, they had a programme-wide goal of increasing the overall programme efficiency and enhancing the NPS score across all stakeholder groups.

Led by an OPEX director acting as the conductor for this project, they coordinated and aligned all other parties to ensure success – Process Managers, multiple Tech Business Analysts, Financial Analysts, HR & Training, and Operational Executives.

The transformation approach our OPEX Team took consisted of 6 key parts:

• Establishing a deep dive analysis of the Voice of Customer, Voice of Processes, and Voice of Data to understand the core challenges facing the operation, and creating a solution matrix that would outline the path to improvement
• A matrix of meeting cadences between various stakeholder groups was established, intended to improve transparency, awareness, and alignment of operational activities and project
• Deployment of our CRM instance with a structured escalation protocol coupled with defined issue categories and actions
• Rolling out a new org structure that shifts processes and roles into Advisory, Sourcing and Onboarding, designed to streamline activities and outsource sourcing and onboarding to staff with specialised skills and technology to complete those tasks.
  • This new structure distributed costs more evenly to allow more resources in tactical work, and apply leadership training, development, and market intel for those in advisory roles to further consultant and lead the programme and customer.
  • The OPEX team along with the programme team and customer stakeholders co-designed multiple dashboards to better display and assign VMS requisition activity and designated thresholds to prioritise work.
• OPEX partnering with our Emerging Tech team to deploy multiple techs including Spotfire for KPI dashboards, TalentNeuron for Market Intel, Teaddl a cloud-based team huddle solution, SalesForce.com for issue tracking and resolution, and DocuSign for visa-letter management
• Building a visual supplier scorecard dashboard that put all supplier performance indicators at the fingertips of users to better align distribution matrixes, efficiently manage and drive our supply chain across the global programme

By allowing our OPEX team to revamp processes and operations within this programme, the outcome was renewed customer involvement which ensured change management and tech adoption went smoothly.

With minimal upfront investment to execute all of the work mentioned above, customer sponsor adoption was easier, and stakeholders trusted our OPEX methodology – allowing us to first investigate then execute fixes based on the detailed findings.

Additional support from customer SMEs also produced actionable business requirements, review of solution designs, and removal of implementation roadblocks which all contributed to a successful outcome.

Additional results included:

• Reduction in sponsor escalations by 75% and improving issue turnarounds to 90% resolution in less than 48hrs
• Open reqs have never exceeded 80 –originally at 300 – and req aging has never exceeded 40% beyond the established 4-week threshold
• 40% shortlist to hire ratios on from active suppliers in key IT job categories