City Link has entered into three new major IT supplier agreements aimed at generating both tangible customer service enhancements and real efficiency improvements.
With a total investment of circa £5 million across three major IT suppliers, this represents a huge project but it is one which will help secure the future competitiveness of the business by creating a modern and robust IT infrastructure and at the same time further reinforce the company's position as the UK's leading premium express parcels carrier.
New agreements have now been put in place with Virgin Media Business for Telephony services, SunGard Availability Services for Cloud & Managed IT services (including data centre supply) and BT for Networking services. Together these make up the business's core IT infrastructure.
The move to appoint new suppliers is a direct result of the acquisition of City Link by Better Capital earlier this year and represents a major investment in the infrastructure of the business. The project is targeting the delivery of greater IT system reliability and availability, improved disaster recovery capabilities and a host of features that will allow the business to continue to improve the customer solutions City Link provides.
Each of the supply contracts was put out to tender to both incumbent and new suppliers to ensure that City Link got the optimum services from best in class providers.
Spearheading the initiative is City Link's IT Director, James Coxon, who will be running the transition project to introduce the new services; he commented:
"Just getting the contracts in place has already been a massive task but also a very exciting one. The data centre, networking and telephony functions are at the very core of the City Link operation and three of the main IT elements which drive the business so it has been vital that we have the right suppliers, who understand our business and equally are able to work together. This is not just an IT project, it's about improving the speed and reliability of the services we provide to our customers day in, day out. This initiative will deliver real benefits to our customers across all our interactions with them; improving our delivery services and our customer care offering."
"This is a truly complex delivery project with major dependencies between the three infrastructure elements we are modernising. For example the telephony solution is hosted in the data centre and relies on the network to work. While, from a programme management point of view, it has been a real challenge, it does mean that we have been able to look at our core IT infrastructure as a whole and put in place a solution that really delivers the customer benefits we're looking to achieve – greater reliability, flexibility and responsiveness."
With the three new agreements in place work has commenced to migrate the systems although there will be no significant transitional work undertaken during the Christmas Peak. Nevertheless testing and development will still continue to ensure that the whole migration is complete from quarter 1 next year with the data centres managed by SunGard Availability Services, Networking supplied by BT and the new Cisco based Telephony service provided by Virgin Media Business.
James Coxon continued: "With the supplier agreements now all in place and the migration process commencing, our focus now is to ensure that we have the right team and all the projects and programmes are aligned so we are ready to hit the ground running in the first quarter of next year and deliver even higher levels of service to our customers going forward."
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