It has not taken long for Sodexho to realise benefits from its outsourcing choice. Since starting the contract in September 2003 (it is up for consideration year-end August 31, 2005), the company has already seen standardisation in its infrastructure and a reduction in resource costs. "I feel the benefits will be realised right through the project," Azoyan says.
He says it has not all been a walk in the park as far as implementing the IBM outsourcing project has gone, or in convincing the company outsourcing was even an option in the first place. "One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting the support needed to go ahead with this outsourcing," Azoyan says. "It is a big cultural change for any organisation to outsource."
Azoyan says it was important that Sodexho had respect for their outsourcer's procedures and guidelines. He says that just finding companies worth considering was a task.
"We had to carefully study all the outsourcing operations of other businesses, review their problems, see how they faced them and basically learn from their own experience," Azoyan says.
He says IBM services have been regularly monitored by the company who also takes a close look at the KPIs and service level agreement quite closely.
"We normally have meetings twice a week to make sure support and maintenance and the help desk is providing the right services."
To ensure the level of service was spot-on, and that the company did not suffer from any faults of the outsourcer, a service level agreement was drawn into the contract. IBM will be penalised financially if there is down-time or other issues with the vendor and the company must make sure they have a full disaster recovery plan in place at all times. Regular updates and maintenance within the system must also be provided.
Azoyan cannot reveal details in regards to the service agreement due to confidentiality reasons; however, he says Sodexho has experienced no down-time since the project's go live date.
"We also wrote in a lot of security measures into the contract," Azoyan says. "It is one of the key areas of our contract, and with the size of IBM as a corporation and its reputation we are quite confident that our security demands will be met."
With any new project come trials and tribulations, and plenty of new challenges for companies to face. Bedding them down over a short period of time can be an achievement in itself. "You face plenty of challenges on a day-to-day basis -- you learn from these and make sure that in the future you do not go through that," Azoyan says.
Once Sodexho's current contract with IBM runs out, the company will have to make a decision -- to keep outsourcing, to keep partnering with IBM or change the contract. "The way we see it, since we have started, is outsourcing is follows our approach to business. We get our clients to outsource part of their service to us, so why should we not do the same?" Azoyan says. "IBM spends a lot of money on its hosting environment and disaster recovery plans."
"I believe companies should focus on their core business and let companies that are capable of doing parts of the business better than you look after those."
"The most important thing is to make the right decision by selecting the right company to do your work for you. We want to focus on our clients so we want everything else to be in place to free us up to do that as best we can."
