Industry news

An agreement has been reached between the Cabinet Office and software firm Collabora Productivity, for the provision of a new range of open source applications for desktop, mobile and cloud.

Crown Commercial Services (CCS) has praised the quality of Collabora’s services, which will allow the Cabinet Office to replace existing office applications with improved software at a very competitive price.

The new software includes two products: Collabora Office and Collabora CloudSuite. This deal, as well as saving the tax payers money, is expected to reduce the government’s reliance on a small number of large suppliers, making it potentially less prone to outsourcing scandal.

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Related: Government Department for BIS ends contract with SSCL, the Met’s new outsourcing partner

A tendering process – with a deadline of 25th November – is being held by Hampshire County Council, who are looking to find a private cloud supplier.

The Council intends to expand its shared service offering and is aiming for a five-year contract, worth £75m, with the possibility of being extension for another two five-year periods.

Other public sector bodies – who share several services with the Council – would also be allowed to make use of the contract. It is thought that major service providers, including Atos, Capita, Sopra Steria and others, may consider making bids.

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Related: Gloucester City Council expands Civica contract after achieving savings of £200,000 a year

Procurement departments are becoming more important for adding value and contributing to growth against the rising cost pressures faced by several mature industries.

Supply Management suggests that the way forward “is to ensure they are integrated into the complete procurement process”. Therefore, handing more responsibility to procurement departments can result in many benefits - not only the promotion of tighter and more transparent relationships between companies and suppliers, but also increased savings and efficiencies for the client company.

However, these processes are affected by many issues – which include risk management, product development and quality of supply. However, they also offer many opportunities, such as the promotion of digitalisation, and higher internal and external performance as a consequence of the procurement processes.

In order to add value and contribute to growth, procurement must be involved earlier in the supply process, producing internal and external benefits such as improving the internal communications, flexibility regarding suppliers and innovation, risks mitigation and higher savings.

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Fujitsu has discharged Capita from a front-end customer service contract prior to its completion. The announcement comes after reports suggesting that Capita’s service delivery has been poor.

The contract was part of a £500m deal between the Post Office and prime contractor Fujitsu to provide a next-generation network (NGN) broadband experience, combined with enhanced customer care and billing solutions for five years, which started in 2012.

TalkTalk and MDS are also part of the deal, delivering network services and advanced consumer billing respectively. Capita was in charge of the call centre arm of the contract.

The Register reports that a new contract has been awarded to HGS to deliver call centre services via its Scotland and Preston offices. The transfer of services is expected to be completed by the end of November. In the meantime, the majority of Capita’s staff are being relocated and moved onto other contracts. However, staff unable to relocate have the option to TUPE to HGS.

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Related: Xchanging board recommends shareholders accept Capita takeover bid

The Institute for Government (IfG) has developed an online tool, with the aim of helping civil servants to better manage outsourced public services contracts.

This tool provides a series of questions – ranging from whether services users are given a choice of provider, to whether changes in government policy are likely to have an impact on the service – which aim to ascertain whether a market fits a specific public service. The outcome will be a report where the different aspects of the proposals are rated by taking viability, risks and possible outcomes into account.

This is expected to counter the government’s poor record for managing contracted-out services, including several striking examples of mismanagement that have involved the likes of Kids Company, Serco and G4S. Today, schools, hospitals, prisons and many other public services rely on private providers funded by the public sector – Serco, G4S, Vodafone, Circle Health and many others – to deliver services on their behalf.

Jo Casebourne, programme director of the IfG, stated: “the prime minister would only be able to deliver on his promise of delivering more for less when civil servants are able to work with these providers.”

In addition, this trend – which has grown during the last decade within the UK – offers a great opportunity for the private and the public sectors to forge a beneficial relationship where optimal and efficient results are obtained at a lower cost.

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Related: CBI chief warns government is putting service providers off public sector work

Capgemini has signed a three-year collaboration deal with UiPath, the specialist automation software company, in order to expand its robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities.

The consulting, technology and outsourcing services provider already puts RPA to use for a number of organisations internationally, automating processes such as data entry, file and data manipulation, automated formatting and multi-format message creation. Capgemini plans to use UiPath’s software to advance its automated technology offering, to “help drive more effective business outcomes and greater business benefits”.

Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath, commented: “Capgemini recognises our technology as being next generation – particularly our superior computer vision-based automation of applications delivered via Citrix.

“For our part, UiPath is keenly aware of Capgemini’s deep knowledge of business processes, automation implementation and change management. I’m confident this collaboration will set new standards for growth and excellence in the RPA sector.”

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Are you looking to enhance your knowledge of RPA?

The National Outsourcing Association is launching a new RPA training programme, including workshops and qualifications. Get in touch to find out more.

The economic slump obliged many governments and companies to undertake cut-outs and seek efficiency through outsourcing their non-core activities.

As Anna Williams points out in Supply Management, the outsourcing of some back house activities such as pricing, invoicing and communication processes, is a good place to start tackling the hidden costs. Using technology at the heart of these processes is key to reduce costs and increase the efficiency of these back house activities, she adds.

The Rainham Group, a refrigeration and air conditioning services company, has been successfully working with Bellrock for the last eight years. This partnership resulted in savings of £22,500 a year, after outsourcing their full time invoice administrator, the postage and the stationary services.

Moreover, a micro-site has been created to guide and facilitate the implementation of this procurement processes – the result of which can be complex for many of the suppliers that aim to outsource their services.

In addition, case studies such as the Raihnam Group partnership with Bellrock, disclose the huge opportunities for both parts that arise from this kind of procurement processes. Hence, as Anna insists, “the nature of procurement is working with different businesses so we have to learn how we can lead this change and to create value for our suppliers and in turn for our stakeholders and clients”.

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Related: Gloucester City Council expands Civica contract after achieving savings of £200,000 a year

NHS Improvement, the result of the merger of Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority (TDA), has called for bids for the delivery of initial consultancy services valued at between £0.7m and £1m.

The contracted services will assist the new agency, set to launch in November, in maximising structural efficiency. Monitor has set out the terms of the contract, which is expected to provide support in the following areas:

• Developing an agreed organisational structure, including overall functions and design principles

• Designing options for a new operating model to provide clarity on how NHS Improvement will deliver its functions

• Developing values and ways of working to underpin the new functions and operations

This is not the first time Monitor has sought external support in the design and development of NHS Improvement. An interim staff programme is currently being set up consisting of a team of 15 to 20 people responsible for the oversight of the programme, guiding key elements of the process and engaging the broader staff bases of the organisations.

The programme is worth £0.8m, meaning the amount spent of external delivery support for the new agency could reach up to £1.8m.

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Related: Financial Times research suggests outsourcing has failed the NHS

After being subjected to a cyber-attack, which resulted in the theft of the private financial information of up to four million customers, the fiasco surrounding TalkTalk and its data security continues.

Most recently, police arrested a 15-year old boy in Northern Ireland in connection with the crime. The week before, TalkTalk claimed it had received a ransom demand from an organisation, suspected by the Metropolitan Police cybercrime unit to be Islamic extremists.

Unsurprisingly TalkTalk shares fell sharply after the telecoms group reported the attack. They have since jumped back by 9 per cent since news of the arrest in Northern Ireland came about.

In February, TalkTalk took legal action against a third-party supplier after a similar breach that led to the exposure of customer data. However, when writing for Sourcingfocus on the subject of outsourcing to manage security risks, Csaba Krasznay, product manager at BalaBit, suggested this sort of case is an anomaly.

He argued that an increasing number of companies are outsourcing IT and data responsibilities precisely in order to vamp up cyber security, and suggested how this might be done:

“An approach which organisations are adopting in order to close the blind spot of traditional security monitoring tools and uncover risks that many security tools cannot identify, is through the use of examining a user’s behavioural patterns. This is carried out through analysing how we interact with IT systems which can leave a recognisable fingerprint that can then be detected.”

Read the full article.

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Capita is winning the race to acquire business processing, technology and procurement specialist Xchanging against private equity firm Apollo, the Financial Times has reported, with the Xchanging board recently recommending that company shareholders accept the global service provider’s £412 million takeover bid.

This is despite the fact that Apollo made its own offer of 170p per share, 10p per share higher than Capita’s valuation of the Xchanging.

“Strategically there are few doubts that Xchanging is a good fit with Capita,” an analyst from Whitman Howard told the FT. “Clearly the numbers point to this being a good deal for Capita.”

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Related: One-fifth of all government IT spend goes straight to Capita