Our business has always been a home for innovation, accelerated development and positive evolution. This year, however, change within our business will take on a renewed focus, as we reach the culmination of a significant and wide-ranging transformation programme.
Transformation is always a major topic – as any of us working in the telecoms and technology sector know. But most of the time, a business like ours is looking outwards and talking to prospective or current customers about how we can help them drive their transformation. Now, this project is a chance for us at Neos Networks to open the door on our own transformation agenda, so that you can see what it’s like, what’s informing our processes and how we hope to improve our business as it develops. This is a chance to explore transformation as it’s happening, instead of talking about it theoretically.
And why? It’s simple really. This is a huge project. Transformation is so often done in a piecemeal fashion, with small projects building up over months and years. Ours is on a much larger scale, with substantial and wide-ranging transformation happening in a defined time period to significantly benefit our people, our clients and our mission.
Why we’re transforming
Initially, our transformation was driven by an important change in our business. We’re in the process of decoupling from the SSE Group, moving to a new ownership model and an exciting future for our company. Of course, being part of the wider group has been hugely beneficial – and we’ll retain some of that in the future. Yet change is always a good spur to look at how we can do things better and improve over the long term.
The watch word here is strategy. Our programme is guided by clear goals to create service improvements for our customers and operational improvements for our business. We’re cutting order to delivery times from months to weeks, with some services aiming to reduce 90 day cycles to 30. In billing, we’re making payment cycles easier to plan for and manage. And we’re creating smarter solutions, so customers can self-serve on things like routes, latency and packet loss. On top of all this, the technologies coming on stream offer greater automation capabilities, which will give our experts the time and space to become proactive, creative problem solvers for our customers.
However, our transformation is not only about tools and tech. We’re guided by ambitions that will improve our network itself, ensuring it’s in robust shape for the communications and connectivity challenges of the remainder of this decade and beyond. We know that a future-facing, modern telecommunications business needs to be agile, robust and able to grow and flex as the market demands. Our transformation work today is enabling that, creating the conditions for our success and yours.
So that’s why we’re transforming: to ensure our business is fit for the future and ready for any challenges that our customers, and our competitors, might throw at us!
Digitally transforming our systems and processes
Central to our strategy is understanding what customers need from us today and what they are likely to need in the future, and how their expectations in terms of experience are changing. That means thinking about things like remote portals where crucial information can be easily accessed, self-service offerings, and for us to be easier to do business with in all areas.
In practice, we’re focusing our transformation across three workstreams that we believe will yield meaningful improvements. The first, Business Support System (BSS), will cover transformation in sales as well as order management and billing systems. While ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) will look at HR, finance and procurement. And a new IT programme will create a new set-up process from a dedicated helpdesk, improved end user computing (including new hardware for everyone ) and better user applications.
Each workstream will inform the onboarding of key new technologies, acquired through a rigorous process that ensures the right fit for our business, our customers and our collective future. So we’re confident that the planned technological changes will drive tangible improvements in many aspects of all of our day to day jobs. Whether it’s Workday (ERP) to modernise our financial and HR planning, Talend to transform how we use data, or the major role that will be played by Cerillion (BSS) in streamlining our lead to order and order to invoice processes.
Importantly, the work we’re doing now is also about laying the groundwork for future improvements. It’s almost cliché to say that transformation never really stops. But in our case, it’s certainly true that the industry we operate in will continue to change over time, and there will be new and advanced technologies that our connectivity services will need to enable. We want to be ready for that, so you can be too.
Find out more
There’s simply no understating the scale of the transformation programme we’re undertaking here. Our separation from SSE Group is a time of huge opportunity, but also complexity as we reposition our business, and take a fresh look at how we can best serve our customers. Fortunately, we are no strangers to complex commercial challenges. And we will carry out this programme with a clear objective to offer our customers and partners better service, a better network and a better business relationship.
Follow us on LinkedIn to learn about future developments in our transformation programme.
