Company description
SD Worx Group NV provides a wide range of services including payroll, HR and fiscal & legal services in EMEA, the US and Canada. SD Worx employs more than 3.600 employees, serves more than 60.000 customers and processes over 4,15 mio pay slips per month. With the acquisition of Ceridian (UK, Ireland and Mauritius) and Fidelis (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) in 2016, SD Worx underlines its ambitious international growth strategy and further strengthens its market position.
Background
Keeping competition at bay, whilst maintaining high levels of service and flexibility towards customers, is a prime objective for the company. In order to keep up with the business challenges this entails, SD Worx decided to outsource its data center infrastructure to an external partner. SD Worx envisioned an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, setup as a hybrid / private cloud. This should allow SD Worx to evolve to a scalable and flexible ICT infrastructure that is able to evolve with the rapidly changing business needs and facilitate multi-country growth.
Role of our team
Xedis was asked to support SD Worx throughout the outsourcing process. More particularly, the engagement comprised guiding and supporting SD Worx and its daughter company ASPEX in selecting the right outsourcing partner. Xedis gathered the requirements, wrote the Request For Proposal (RFP) and Best And Final Offer (BAFO), and supported SD Worx in the vendor selection process up to contract negotiation.
Approach
Xedis is recognized in the market for its professional approach in supporting companies in
various types of outsourcing deals.
For such engagements, Xedis uses its proprietary ‘Vendor Selection Toolkit’. This toolkit comprises a wide range of templates and checklists. It covers an end-to-end methodology to support the outsourcing process, starting from Selection, Due Diligence, Transition up to Service delivery. It ensures we don’t miss out on key elements during the process and allows us to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
The approach taken for SD Worx specifically focused on the part ‘Selection’ of the methodology. In short, the following steps were taken:
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Gather requirements
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Write RFP / BAFO
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Evaluate the offers and provide support in selecting the vendor
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Support contract negotiations
Results
The project for Xedis started at the end of June 2016. The RFP was published early August and sent to a longlist of 4 vendors. Based on the offers received, a shortlist of the 2 best candidates was compiled. These vendors were invited to provide their BAFO at the end of October. After having evaluated the BAFO’s and going through several rounds of negotiation, in March 2017, SD Worx decided to award the contact and successfully concluded the contact with their new outsourcing partner early April 2017.
Customer testimonial
We selected Xedis as our partner to guide us through the difficult process of selecting the appropriate supplier to outsource our complete data center infrastructure. With the help of Xedis and a number of internal experts, we managed to complete this process (from gathering requirements up to signing the contract with the preferred supplier) well within 1 year.
Even though we encountered many unforeseen circumstances and challenges, we managed to successfully go through this tendering process, thanks to the expertise and flexibility that the Xedis consultant brought to SD Worx.