In September 2003, Sodexho started its partnership with IBM. Sodexho in the past had already embraced outsourcing with its telecommunications -- it worked with Telstra to introduce a network running through the Asia-Pacific.
"It was a great achievement, especially seeing as Telstra had just moved into the Asian market. We used that network to minimise costs by paying only one company, not many in each country, and we simplified our system," Azoyan says.
Sodexho has also outsourced its human resourcing and payroll function to Automatic Data Processing (ADP). "Before this we were doing all hosting of password authentication protocol (PAP), maintenance, and support ourselves, at each location."
Sodexho was finding its back end, the finance section, to be a nightmare. "We had difficulties with untimely management reporting and communication problems with different finance teams in each organisation that came about from the use of different systems, plus it was taking time and energy away from our core business functions," Azoyan says.
Finding a system to match business prerogatives can be hard, but Azoyan says the company found a staple level of cooperation, flexibility, and service offerings in IBM's system to allow them to try out the new way of operating with early benefits. They also allowed for Sodexho to have constant input into the application and service. IBM was able to revamp the company's existing SAP system in Australia to make it ready for the Asian rollout as a hosted solution.
"The IBM business on demand application was perfectly suited to us," Azoyan says. "We started outsourcing this to IBM at the same time we starting rolling it into our Asia-Pacific offices. It is a very flexible contract we have with IBM, which gives benefits of managing our costs with desired input."
The new application meant Sodexho could centralise all of its finance -- running it all out of one office instead of many different offices. All Sodexho's finance operations are now done in Sydney. "That cut down on our infrastructure, which has been another major benefit," Azoyan says. "Now that we are using one application it does not matter where we sit -- we have the same application running from Thailand as we do from China. It means all our directors can see all the reporting on time everywhere, regardless of their location."
Staffing levels also changed. While IBM has the majority of staff running the finance application, Sodexho has put two of its key staff, as employees of the company, on the project to work with IBM solely on its implementation. "These are the only staff changes -- these people have been replaced with temporary staff within their departments to make sure your day-to-day business does not suffer," Azoyan says.
People working in the company's finance section before have now been shifted into more analytical roles, whereas before these departments worked solely in processing. On top of this, all of Sodexho's costs, including staffing in this area, shifted to variable.
With a standard platform in place from a global provider, Sodexho can now open new offices in other locations and overcome language and systems barriers. "We had to choose an application that could manage all language and multi-currencies," Azoyan says. SAP was the best currency application they could find.
