PHS

Case Study

PHS Group

PHS Group is the leading workplace service provider in the UK. It has turnover in excess of £355m and 5000 staff supporting the delivery of a diverse portfolio of products and services, from washroom and office facilities to storage and waste management. They have grown, both organically and through acquisition, now managing multiple branded divisions and interacting with their customers across multiple channels including their 102 branches and 1000+ seat contact centres.

The company prides itself on offering total service management to its 250,000 customers that cut across a range of sectors including retail, government and leisure. PHS maintains a strong client focus, setting out to “improve everybody’s workplace and make our customers’ lives just that little bit easier.”

The Challenge

The concern at PHS was that their existing end-to-end business system was approaching the end of its life. It was a very complex application developed in-house, containing 15 years of specific business rules co-coordinating people, activities and products right across the company’s diverse service offering. It was becoming unreliable and difficult to integrate with newer products, and the hardware and resources to support and develop it were becoming scarce and costly.

“Our position was to look for a proven software package to replace what was becoming a risky and expensive system,” says Group Software Manager Matthew Davies, “Enterprise applications of the right scale, like Oracle and SAP, were too expensive to implement, and every other package was too limiting compared with our existing system”.

“We soon realised that, if we wanted to maintain our unique business processes and further our differentiation, we would have to continue developing the system ourselves. This was a challenging proposition suggesting significant timescales, costs and risks.”

Quantiv’s Solution

Having already made the decision to move to a cost-effective Microsoft SQL Server environment, PHS started to look for a platform to help them build a custom-fitting system without all of the risk involved in starting from the ground up. PHS used Quantiv’s Sales & Fulfilment Platform and proven implementation approach to create an all-new, multichannel sales and order fulfilment system. Having discussed their requirements, business rules and processes in detail together, Quantiv’s business analysts worked with the PHS team to produce a comprehensive system design, which the company’s in-house team then delivered.

“Because the Quantiv Sales & Fulfilment Platform provides the fundamental building blocks, and radically reduces the risk and effort involved in creating, running, supporting and changing a new system, we were able to focus on business logic and functionality rather than worrying about the technology.”

The Result

Matthew said “Quantiv’s advanced software platform, was ready to use, which was a huge bonus. It considerably reduced our development time, and maximised the investment we had made in distributed server architecture”.

The breadth of PHS’s legacy system also meant putting all its confidence in the Quantiv solution, and launching a large-scale replacement with a big bang. Given that this embraced everything from call centre support to hardware, service and employee management and sales ledger processing, this would have been an unlikely prospect if the company had had to develop it from scratch.

The Benefits & the Future

PHS now have a single integrated system, giving the company far more effective and intelligent access to its data. Its relationships with its customers have been transformed by the visibility it now has across its entire operation, enabling it to respond to customer enquiries and demands faster and more efficiently and run meaningful, MI-driven CRM campaigns.

“On a technical level they also offered something we’d hardly dared hope for: a way of building a system which worked the way we wanted to without having to start from scratch. And, unlike our old system, it has been designed to be changed quickly, safely and cost-effectively, with virtually no down-time.”

“One of the key reasons we decided to work with Quantiv was its approach to us as a customer. We felt that these were people we could work with; they quickly developed a crucial understanding of our business requirements and helped us considerably to achieve our goals.”