AMS - supporting a Russell Group University

So the client is a large Russell Group university with around 30,000 students. They've just finished a 3-4 year transformation project at a really significant investment and actually had ended up with one of the largest Oracle footprints within Europe.

It encompasses finance, HCM, payroll, project accounting, and they also have a very complex integration set up.

We're now coming to the stage where they needed to think about the stabilisation of their programme and how they could be continually evolving this to meet the needs of their students, their academics and their professional services staff going forward.

The client challenge is really around getting value from their technology investment. They had a partner who really wasn't delivering high enough quality on their core service management objectives around incident volumes.

The volume of incidents was high and that was placing undue pressure on their internal business teams.

So our solution was centred around application managed services. So when we started out our conversations with the client, we were providing advice around how they could leverage their platform and work with their existing provider, but as those conversations unravelled, then the client started to ask us around, 'Actually, how could you execute on this and how could you take that advisory relationship through into managing the ongoing service?'

The most pleasing aspect for me is seeing the impact that the team have had. They've cleared a number of long outstanding issues which has enabled us to now focus on the continual transformation and evolution of a platform.

We're not just doing the advisory role. We're actually delivering the services as well for the client and with the client.

The specific proposition that we had was specifically in relation to their Oracle estate, so taking over their application management of those new platforms that they'd invested.

We transitioned the client using our established AMS operational framework and onboarding processes, and these were delivered through our operational help team. This allowed us to run with the service from day one.

We're actually helping them develop their technology to enhance the experience for students, staff and academics and also to help this deliver much more on the outcomes that the university needs. It's all about the students. Everything we're doing is about how do we create that 24/7 unique student experience? We've improved the student's experience by them being able to make their payments online, to be able to track and see what's going on with their finances, links to accommodation, how they can be paying not only their fees but any other interest that they may have through memberships.

I genuinely believe that our offering is different to others in the marketplace. We combine the technology expertise with an agile managed service approach to deliver true value for our clients.

Leveraging things like machine learning, artificial intelligence and process automation to ensure that we are actually doing things faster, smarter and more efficiently for our clients. In a short space of time, we've managed to build a significant amount of trust. Now we're looking forward to how we can create long-term value as a partnership. I think that's really exciting. We can see tangible outcomes from what we're delivering as a partnership.