Helping Smiths News to Seize New Business Opportunities

Capgemini’s open, collaborative style makes it easy to combine their skills and talents with our knowledge and experience, ensuring every project is delivered successfully, on time and within budget. (…) Working with Capgemini, we are successfully transforming our entire business by moving the service we give our customers from “gold” to “platinum”, while simultaneously pursuing new business opportunities on an IT platform that is at last agile enough to match our vision Richard Webb, IS Director, Smiths News

The Situation

Smiths News, the UK’s leading newspaper and magazine wholesaler, was determined to meet ambitious performance targets while continuing its quest to constantly improve service and value-for-money for its retailer customers, and respond to the stringent demands of the fast-growing supermarket sector.

At the same time it was keen to pursue many new opportunities for expansion by offering additional services to its customers and supply chain partners.

To do so effectively would require a new and much more flexible level of IT support as well as professional advice and expertise in specific areas such as CRM and project management.

The Solution

Realising the vital role of IT in its plans for the future – and in every area of current operations – the company selected Capgemini to run its entire systems infrastructure on a long-term outsourcing basis, tasking them with reducing total cost of ownership and further enhancing already high service levels.

The main aim, however, was to achieve two key benefits: to reduce the complexity of the infrastructure to enable easier management, and to gain new levels of business agility through access to new, world-class technology from an IT partner with a global track record and a collaborative approach.

The Result

A complete technology makeover, delivered through the close collaboration of Smiths News, Capgemini, IBM and SAP, has now replaced the old ‘hard-wired’ systems with new, flexible 21^st century technology, able to respond rapidly to any amount of internal and external change.

Supporting market-leading products from IBM, SAP and Business Objects serving an Oracle database, the infrastructure transformation has also brought significant advances in service levels, reliability and cost-effectiveness.

Most important of all, the new technology platform is providing the springboard for additional revenue-earning services that are already being introduced with the help of consultancy advice from Capgemini.