Global Insurance Group - Xoomworks partners with one of the world’s largest insurance groups to ensure the ongoing enhancement, support and availability of the business-critical purchase-to-payment solution.

The Challenge: Enabling the strategic objectives

Founded in 1872, the client is one of the world's largest insurance groups       with a global network of subsidiaries and offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and other markets. 60,000 employees serve customers     in more than 170 countries. 18 months ago, in line with board-level strategies, the client decided to outsource the maintenance and support of its group-wide Ariba implementation.

With such a large global operation, the client recognised that implementing localised Ariba support services for each country would be extremely inefficient – both in terms of quality of service and costs. What was needed was global maintenance and support expertise able to deliver the necessary services, regardless of location, language and time zone.

The organisation approached a number of managed IT services organisations but was unable to identify a prospective partner with the required Ariba expertise, multi-lingual capabilities and ability to support its business units across the globe.

The Solution: Multi-lingual, multi-country Ariba support

Xoomworks had already partnered with the client on a variety of complex development projects and had consistently delivered on time, to budget and to strategic objectives. This, combined with Xoomworks’ proven expertise in designing, developing, implementing and supporting large scale Ariba implementations, and its ability to deliver tailored, multi-lingual support during business hours irrespective of time zones from a central location, made them the partner of choice.

As well as with its central London base, Xoomworks’ Managed Services operates from a nearshore outsourcing centre based in Cluj, Romania, giving the company access to specialist analysts, highly experienced in all aspects of project design, development, implementation, maintenance and support, and with the multilingual skills that were critical to the success of this project.

The Results: Group-wide utilisation

Following detailed evaluations of the client’s existing process and procedures, Xoomworks put forward a comprehensive proposal for the maintenance and support of the Ariba system, with particular emphasis on user support, catalogue management, data maintenance, and system monitoring. The proposal was accepted and Xoomworks hired six dedicated multilingual analysts operating out of Cluj to work under an additional level of management support located in the UK.  Xoomworks initiated their comprehensive transition process, which was successfully completed over a realistic timeframe and incorporated a robust and well proven recruitment and on-boarding process for new team members.

Xoomworks is now responsible for many key aspects of Ariba system support on a global basis, providing monitoring and maintenance services, delivering tailored and multi-lingual help-desk and support services to end-users, and working closely with the clients local country teams to help enhance the Ariba system and its adoption both internally and from external suppliers. An initial objective of this was for the thorough documentation of the Supplier Enablement processes. As part of this process, the client’s North America Procurement team hosted two Xoomworks analysts for eight days of intensive knowledge transfer and training. ”The time spent with Ariba team was very productive,” added Nic Hutchins, Xoomworks’ Managing Director. “Great teamwork led to successfully detailing and documenting the key processes.”

Effective and efficient support across the group

Crucial to the success of the service has been the extremely close and continuing relationships between Xoomworks and the client’s Ariba teams. “The Xoomworks team in Cluj has become an integral part of our internal Ariba team by providing operational support to our Ariba Managers,” explained the Client Ariba Operations Manager. “They have quickly developed the knowledge and expertise to support our Ariba environment. Critical to the success of this engagement is the ability of the Xoomworks team to fluently speak English, French, Italian, German and Spanish in order to effectively and efficiently support our teams across the group.”

Eighteen months on, the client’s board-level strategy remains on budget and to objective. With responsibility for maintenance and support safely in the hands of the experts, the internal Ariba teams have been able to drive enhancement, development and adoption projects across the entire organisation.

“I am impressed how quickly this highly motivated team learned and came up to speed. A key to this success were certainly the country visits, which allowed the Agents to see how things were dealt with locally, and -most important - to build their network in all relevant functions. Country visits are planned for twice a year, and the next round is just around the corner."

Client Ariba Operations Manager.