The ongoing industry-standard benchmarking exercise provides Mercer with a full picture of its IT service performance. And while it has revealed that Mercer already enjoys a lower cost per call than its peers, the two companies are far from complacent. As Cowton explains: “Our goal is for the service desk to be achieving above the industry-average performance for less than the industry average cost. This is not something that can be achieved overnight, and we are working with Computacenter on a number of initiatives through our Service Improvement Programme.”

As part of its ‘added value’ approach, Computacenter encourages its local support personnel to take on additional tasks, such as IT audits and installing PDAs, to help support the business and provide increased flexibility. “The local support personnel are viewed as extremely valuable, and are very much part of the Mercer team,” comments Cowton. “We believe it is very important for our staff to have continuity when requesting IT services, and to have someone on-site to help them where relevant.”
In addition, Computacenter provided training and engineering resource for the deployment of Microsoft Windows and Office XP, which was completed in just five months. “Computacenter was responsible for two out of three implementation streams, and its resources and skills were essential for the successful completion of the project,” comments Cowton.

The service desk is involved in the roll-out of all new technology to ensure that it can provide the necessary support to Mercer’s end users. This engagement process is documented in a series of detailed project plans, depending on the size of the deployment. In 2003, there were 51 major IT projects. Despite such a rapidly changing environment and approximately 7,000 calls a month, the number of complaints from users is minimal – consistently less than 0.1 per cent.

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More and more organisations are converging their data and voice networks to enable them to take advantage of new technologies. Kent Police was quick to recognise the financial and value benefits of using Voice Over IP, resulting in financial savings, enhanced performance levels and consistent communications services across the county .

With staff spread across multiple sites around the world, Mercer needs maximum reliability from its IT infarstructure Mercer Human Resource Consulting is one of the world’s leading consulting organisations, with some 13,000 staff in 40 countries. Its work covers all aspects of strategic and operational human resource consulting to help companies achieve measurable business results through their people, and to support them through business challenges such as mergers and acquisitions, change management, and globalisation.

In the UK Mercer has around 3,000 staff spread across 26 sites, which creates a challenging IT service management environment. As Nigel Cowton, workforce services manager at Mercer, explains: “Our users do business all over the world, and they often need access to technology outside of core working hours. To ensure that they have continuous access to the IT systems critical to their work, it is essential we provide round-the-clock support services no matter what their location.”

Mercer opted to outsource the management of its 4,500 desktops/laptops and 1,300 printers to an external services provider. “Desktop and printer management is not a core skill for Mercer, and we were keen to drive down costs as much as possible,” adds Cowton. “We wanted a managed end-to-end service desk that was proactive, and to work with a company that would transcend the traditional supplier/client relationship to create a partnership that was dedicated to delivering efficient IT services to our internal customers.”

Computacenter provides Mercer with both on-site and remote support services, co-ordinated via a state-of-the-art service desk based at its Milton Keynes Service Support Centre. The service desk has more than 180 analysts, who – depending on service demand – can be called on to supplement the team dedicated to Mercer. The service desk analysts use a range of remote management tools to enable cost-effective and efficient fault resolution, as a result of which more than half of Mercer’s calls are resolved by first line analysts.

The service desk also provides Mercer with a Major Incident Management Function, which ensures that all business-impacting incidents are managed closely and progress is communicated across the company. This remote team is also the first point of contact for Mercer staff needing IT assistance or requesting a move/change. “To ensure we provide the right mix of expertise to support Mercer, we use call metrics to define the level of skills and experience required by first and second line analysts, and initiate changes to reflect the needs of the business,” explains James Westcott, service desk manager at Computacenter.

Call metrics are also a fundamental part of the IT services benchmarking programme that has become key to the contract – and to how Mercer measures the value of its IT services. As Cowton explains: “Computacenter and Mercer made a joint commitment to work towards a range of enhanced metrics. Not only does this process provide the business with an independent way to measure the value and efficiency of our IT services, it also helps us to assess the impact of new projects and any potential disruption.”