Innovative Solution for Business Continuity Management
A DREAM generates huge Savings for Sykes Global Services with an astonishing 99% cost improvement
Every contact centre has Disaster Recovery planning. It's an essential backup but in most cases it is confined to meeting a simple utility crisis such as a major power outage.
However, with the benefit of more than a few years' experience, Edinburgh-based Sykes Global Services' Les Torrance and colleague Alice Menzies have progressed their centre's Disaster Recovery programme far in advance of the accepted levels of protection against energy failures at their three centres in the East of Scotland. However, the demands of these more sophisticated Disaster Recovery measures against a background of equipment failures, perhaps down to a very local level, was absorbing an unacceptable amount of expensive executive time. In short, the task had become impossible to manually administer without further expansion to the company’s support team.
Thus was born the company's DREAM initiative providing transparent real time information for Sykes' spread of subsidiary companies throughout Europe and even embracing South Africa.
The DREAM initiative was built by Factonomy, Edinburgh software design specialists, using the Factonomy Framework using Declarative XML and was designed, developed and introduced in just six weeks by Factonomy, a leading enabler of web-based business solutions.
"DREAM is an acronym we developed. It stands for Disaster Recovery Electronic Automated Mechanism," explains Alice Menzies, who has been the principal driver of this ground breaking initiative. "For example, an update to the DR plan such as the addition of a new call centre location would previously have taken me up to six weeks to make the myriad changes with almost endless downstream impacts to our plan. In comparison, it is unlikely that this job would now take more than a couple of minutes – the scale of the improvement is of this order and I'm not exaggerating," adds Alice.
Importantly, Alice Menzies is now able to precisely measure the massive time savings for updating the system each time there is a change to data required in the event of an outage. Using the previous DR plan, which was only commissioned in 2004, annual management time inputs almost exclusively expended on updating work was consuming 2,343-hours. With DREAM, this is almost unbelievably reduced to 13 hours of annual management time, equivalent to a 99.5% improvement or a reduction from £58,000 to £660. "We have barely been able to believe it ourselves," confesses Alice.
But these savings pale into insignificance if the financial and relationship consequences of a major outage are considered. In these circumstances, a full suite of data will allow Sykes to take all the necessary remedial actions to reinstate normal business with minimum delay. As an example, Sykes EMEA acts for one client with over a thousand agents active in half a dozen centres. Potential downtime in this case could be catastrophic in terms of cost – and the effect on the client relationship.
"But what is really exciting for us as the pioneers is that there is no other system even remotely as advanced as DREAM," says Les Torrance, endorsing Alice Menzies' claim. In the first instance, we set out to develop a DR system which, when there was an outage allowed us to pinpoint the cause of the failure and the impact on the business in any of the nine centres included in the initiative. Automatically, DREAM displays the solution, with all necessary information regarding components, local contact details of the repairer, shift information and the potential downstream impact of the failure, which might be across several sites.
At the outset, it's worth sketching out the holistic nature of DREAM. "The system embraces all data, which may relate to an outage - being client identity, sites, shifts, components, suppliers allowing strategic managers and administrative staff to look in from the top for management reasons and IT and other technical staff to view operational status and remedy from the bottom up."
The key to DREAM has been the development of a predictive system showing the knock-on impact of a failure, which might be vertical or horizontal – and could be one of a very large number of 'components' be it a server, router or a major utility. "To summarise, we have just launched the system, which took a matter of weeks to develop. We were fortunate in finding perhaps the only software house in the UK, which was able to meet our unusual remit of 'this is the result we want, not we need a system to achieve this result'," explains Alice Menzies.
Geoff Kell, CEO of Factonomy, said the company was talking to a number of potential licensees looking to tap into a range of new markets: "They are keen to do business with us because the Factonomy Framework, based on declarative XML, is flexible, facilitates rapid development and runs in a familiar web-based environment, which ensures enthusiastic user adoption, dramatically increasing productivity," he said.
Further information from Alice Menzies of Sykes on 0131 458 6500, Magnus Bray of Factonomy on 0870 752 1441, Mike Westmacott for Sykes on 0131-319 1477 or Anthony Garvey for Factonomy on 00 353 877 979 279.
Notes to Editors:
Listed on NASDAQ (SYKE), Sykes Enterprises had revenues in 2007 of $710m. Sykes is a global outsourcer providing customer contact management and related services. The company provides after-sales support, customer care, channel management, e-commerce, and fulfilment solutions for clients in the consumer electronics, broadband, mobile communications, consumer products, financial services and technology sectors. Globally the company employs over 27,000 people in 45 centres in 19 countries. Sykes EMEA operates 17 contact management centres and 3 fulfilment centres in 25 languages, employing over 5,000 people.
