Helping Centrica deliver a better service

Centrica PLC is a FTSE 100 multinational utility company employing over 37,000 people, with annual revenue of £26bn and 30 million customer accounts. Centrica sources, trades, generates, processes, services, stores and supplies energy to businesses and consumers in the UK and North America.

THE CHALLENGE…

Centrica’s telephony and networks department is constantly striving to deliver the very best service to its 30 million customers. Improving IT, delivery and technology capabilities is fundamental to this, yet the internal project delivery function managing these improvements was staffed predominantly by contract resources creating a number of challenges.

Contract resource wasn’t aligned with corporate strategy; they added management overheads to the business and exposed Centrica to risk with individuals possessing niche expertise leaving the company. Costs were also escalating as critical individuals became expensive to retain.

The telephony and networks department  decided to introduce a single outsourced delivery service to manage these issues, whilst at the same time improving network and IT delivery services across its business. Centrica needed to find a supplier with a proven track record in delivering complex network and IT projects, able to continually resource demand, and mitigate risk by ensuring knowledge was retained and shared with the business.

THE SOLUTION…

Centrica selected CACI as their managed services delivery partner to help them deliver a number of complex network and IT projects.

Their engagements included:

Delivery management.
CACI developed requirements in-line with both the business and suppliers to agree and deliver solutions across telephony and networks. This brought together experts in firewall, architecture, IS security and operations.

Firewall management.
Working across the entire security estate, CACI designed, documented and delivered changes to the firewall in accordance with Centrica’s standards and agreed SLAs.

We selected CACI because they had a unique combination of large scale and multiple project delivery experience with high technical competence across network, IT, security and operations. They were also willing and able to adopt Centrica’s existing processes, while proposing and implementing improvements based upon their own knowledge across multiple comparable enterprises.

Kifi Dalvey, Senior Project Manager

RESULTS & BENEFITS…

Working closely with Centrica’s key internal stakeholders, CACI deployed a flexible resourcing model, (scaled up or down as projects required), minimising commercial risk whilst satisfying customer expectations. Centrica has also benefitted from a consistent delivery methodology, regular financial and service reviews that have helped to improve cost control, reduced management overhead and a consolidated supplier list.

Benefits from specific projects have included:

Company-wide room booking system: Including development, packaging, testing and deployment, this programme is expected to save Centrica £9m in catering and room booking costs over 5 years.

Video conferencing: Comprising 45 video conference end-points located across Centrica and British Gas businesses, video conferencing was migrated to a fully hosted, centralised service from Vodafone. Centrica has since cut 10% of its travel and accommodation costs in just one year.

Voice transformation: By replacing all legacy telephony systems with Cisco Unified Communications and Genesys Intelligent Network Routing, CACI was able to help Centrica consolidate technologies and rationalise suppliers and associated support contracts.

Call routing: CACI designed and deployed a British Gas Services and Business Intelligent Call Routing programme, integrating it with SAP CRM and business workflows to optimise call delivery. Call handling time has since been reduced and customer experience improved.

Successful project delivery aside, CACI’s service reviews have helped us to understand much more about financial recharging throughout each quarter, what project milestones have been achieved and what service improvements we should be considering and implementing each month.

Peter Pratt, Head of Telephony & Networks

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