challenge
The client, one of America’s oldest financial institutions, was struggling to manage a mix of internal and external vendors across 11 geographically distributed Tier 3 and 4 data centers. Key obstacles included:
- an inability to focus on core business areas due to the burden of installing, replacing and decommissioning servers at multiple state-of-the-art facilities
- chronic issues with turnover and understaffing
Faced with these and other pressing business challenges, the client sought a strategic partner for support — and our demonstrated expertise converting external employees and vendors to employees and subcontractors made all the difference.
solution
The client conducted an extensive vetting process, ultimately selecting Randstad Technologies based on the strength of our solution. The solution focused on several areas for improvement, namely:
- increasing visibility into costs by creating a highly structured work-authorization process that documented authorization for work beyond the scope of the managed services contract and distinguished between hourly billed and fixed-fee managed services
- bolstering communication processes — for instance, by standardizing weekly calls between our delivery director and individual site managers, which helped disseminate best practices and ensure knowledge sharing
- introducing skills-proficiency matrices to assess job requirements, and developing comprehensive performance plans for skills gaps
outcome
Randstad Technologies not only assumed full-scope responsibility for managing the client’s 11 world-class data centers, but in so doing engineered major improvements to them, including:
- comprehensively transitioning large-scale client-side resources — including 24 full-time employees, 18 subcontractors, five vendors and around 100 hourly staff-augmentation contractors — to new roles as managed services employees and subcontractors at Randstad Technologies within a single month
- creating robust service-level measurements and performance metrics, ensuring continual tracking of service level attainment to grade performance
- developing a closed-loop change-control compliance process, which enabled the client to more effectively measure the adoption of key new policies and procedures
- standardizing communications between data centers
- reducing unnecessary overtime costs and curbing turnover, which translated to clear value on the client’s balance sheet
Today, the client leverages Randstad Technologies’ recruiting capabilities for access to quality talent on an ad hoc basic in order to complete incremental project work. With very little advance notice, we're able to flex and scale to meet the client’s needs — so we can be every bit as agile as your next opportunity or challenge, too.
