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Helping a global telecommunications manufacturer find 400 SAP/R3 professionals

When a global telecoms company faced issues finding enough SAP/R3 professionals to complete business-critical projects, it turned to Quanta.

The company needed to find a large number of highly skilled SAP/R3 professionals quickly, to support a mission-critical e-business programme. Working with its incumbent resourcing partner, the process was taking far too long – and the delays were costing the company around $100,000 per week.

As is often the case, the incumbent supplier was focusing its attention solely on using external contract staff to fill the gap – but this was proving both expensive and ineffectual. To compound this, the company’s permanent staff were not fully utilised, and skills were not being transferred from contractors to the permanent staff – in effect, securing the positions of the contractors at the expense of the company.

Quanta’s approach was to take short-term ownership of the recruitment and resourcing processes – in order to apply rapid improvements in how recruitment was managed. Quanta’s extensive experience in resourcing enabled it to implement a highly effective 10-week programme of improvement – bringing the situation under control. At the end of the improvement programme, Quanta was able to hand back control to the company’s resourcing partner – so that the programme could be continued under the structure implemented by Quanta.

Actions taken included:

• Discovery and planning
• Gained control of the recruitment process
• Implemented effective communications between incumbent supplier, the client and third parties
• Consolidated recruitment activities
•  Established master resource schedule and demand profile
• Implemented formal performance measurement across all activity areas
• Utilised the client’s internal resourcing managers to find suitable candidates already working within the client’s global organisation
• Assessed key roles that could adversely affect the outcome of the programme – and utilised the client’s current partners to provide ‘nice’ skills
• Assigned three interim programme managers to key roles
• Established formal weekly reviews with all parties
• Reduced usage of second-tier agencies and implemented a ‘reward and penalty’ scheme to further help control resourcing

Results included:

• Removed delays in finding suitable resources – prior to Quanta’s involvement, there had been four delays of more than a week; after, none were reported
• The average time to recruit top-priority people was dramatically cut, from 2-3 weeks to just 24-48 hours
• Use of internal staff was improved to 34% – it had been just 7%
• The client reduced its external spend with recruitment agencies by around $3.7m per year
• Consolidation of recruitment agencies delivered a 22% reduction in the cost of acquiring new contractors
• Internal confidence levels increased from 31% to 96%
• The client adopted all of Quanta’s process improvements
• The client has no residual dependency on Quanta

 

The project transformed how recruitment is managed within the client organisation – especially in terms of processes to manage the timely supply of resources and to keep costs controlled.

 “Having retained Quanta to review our resourcing process, I would recommend them to anyone. They have made, and will continue to make, a major contribution to the success of our e-business programme.”
– Client competence manager for the e-business programme