Unisys Africa inks partnership with BEE consultancy Rethink

Unisys Africa has inked an agreement with management consultancy Rethink that formalises a three-year working arrangement and sees the two businesses providing complementary skills to their clients.

Rethink is a BEE company that specialises in helping businesses with their development initiatives, be they designing new or improving existing processes and operations, while Unisys Africa offers consulting, systems integration, outsourcing, infrastructure services and server technology.

"In striving to service our clients` needs, we understood that nobody can be everything to everybody," says Kenneth Beard, director at Rethink. "We don`t want to own the resources that Unisys Africa has and vice versa, but we have common clients who need our combined resources."

Rethink specialises in, at a business level:

* Process improvement and re-engineering;
* Information management;
* Strategy implementation;
* Product management;
* Functional specification definition; and
* Project management and change management

"Rethink`s methodology complements what Unisys aims to achieve with 3D Visible Enterprise (3DVE)," says Allan Wattrus, practice director: global infrastructure services at Unisys Africa. "This methodology allows organisations to understand the dependencies and relationships between four layers in the organisation: strategy and structure; business processes; applications; and infrastructure."

Wattrus says the methodology hinges on understanding that all activities need to be traceable back to the organisation`s vision and strategy, and what does not contribute must be shed. "What we strive for is to identify and align every piece of technology, application, infrastructure and business process with the vision and strategy, removing inefficiencies and redundancies."

This relationship has allowed the partners to engage at a global level with Mittal Steel, providing a global IT policy framework.

"Our working relationship kicked off with Unisys Africa assisting one of our clients with an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) best practices implementation and with their technology infrastructure," says Beard.

The two businesses have collaborated and will continue to do so in submitting tenders for government contracts.

"The relationship is founded on sound principles and mutual respect. We are not trying to deliver solutions on our own, but aim to position our collective service as the strongest force in the market," says Beard.

Unisys Africa and Rethink have partnered on numerous other projects including at Cell C, Man Truck & Bus, Technikon Witwatersrand (now University of Johannesburg) and Standard Bank.