Compass South Africa have awarded a Thirty Five million Rand Information Systems consulting and Outsourcing contract to Centricity, a 75% owned Grintek Group Company.
One of the ingredients of a successful company recipe is its ability to continually better its business, and seek new ways of improving performance. This agility is a crucial component of any company wishing to gain a competitive advantage in South Africa today. With this in mind Compass SA, part of Compass Group PLC - the world's largest foodservice company - set out to outsource its I.T operations in order to add economies of scale for planned future growth.
After a comprehensive and lengthy RFP process Compass SA appointed Centricity who specialise in Information Engineering and Outsourcing Services, not only as their IT systems partner, but to assist the company in optimising its business process by aligning its people, processes and technology to the Compass business strategy. "Accessibility and delivery of relevant information is critical for our company to operate at its peak, whether it be the debtors department receiving an accurate invoice on time or any activity in the entire supply chain," says Alan Banister, director of information services at Compass SA.
"We want to ensure that through proper process management the delivery of our information is streamlined - the bottom line is for us to improve our overall business performance."
Centricity had already taken responsibility of managing Compass SA's technology infrastructure allowing Compass SA to focus on it core business, the delivery of food services.
"Centricity's expertise and highly qualified information engineering skills are more than qualified to help us intelligently map our business processes and assist us to create an improved information architecture," adds Banister.
The first phase of the processes optimisation project requires Centricity to examine and map the business processes within Compass SA, thereby identifying the areas of constraint within the processes.
Once this has been established Centricity will develop methods to improve these processes. No mean feat as Compass SA employs over 6500 staff in South Africa.
Says Clive Stother, Business Development Director at Centricity: "Many businesses make the mistake of 'throwing' technology at problems involving business processes and the automation thereof without ensuring that the existing processes are the most efficient ones. If a process does not work manually, it will not work any better with technology. Therefore a 100% business, not technology focused, approach is required."
Once the problem areas are highlighted and redefined Centricity will pull in a partner with the experience and skill to implement the technology based solution. Current Centricity implementation partners include IDION Solutions, ICL and ERP.com Stother continues, "Centricity's approach to process optimisation, centres around the Completeness, Relevance, Accuracy, Timeliness and Accessibility of the business users information requirements. (CRATA). This proven approach will be the intelligence behind the processes allowing Compass SA's business to run better and more effectively.
"However, business is perpetually evolving and the mapping of processes is the component that is continually redefined and refined therefore, Centricity not only re-engineers these processes but monitors the processes in order to identify new constraints and modify the processes accordingly."
Banister concludes, "Accessibility of information is key to our staff as this allows them to understand each employees role, making performance inter-dependency transparent and open. Centricity's consultancy is the vehicle to take us towards this natural state of co-dependency and working towards a common planned objective."
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