STORY

CapacityGRID was born out of the limitations of shared services. From experience we knew that sharing lowers costs and provides more resilient services. However, there are challenges. It takes a lot of time and investment to get things up and running. Moving work to shared service centres often results in a loss of local employment. And too frequently sharing means that services are no longer tailored to local requirements. We needed an approach that had all the benefits of sharing services, but without the drawbacks.

So we decided to approach the challenge a different way. Instead of moving people to work, why not move work to people?

Transactional services are based on data collection, processing and analysis. In theory, this work can be completed by anybody with the right skills, regardless of where they are located. By moving work around virtually, we could combine the economies of scale of shared services with the control advantages of local delivery.

So that’s what we did. We started by digitising as much as we could. For example, while it’s not possible to digitise an inspection, it is possible to capture the inspection information digitally and send it anywhere in the country for onward processing.

We then organised the work to take advantage of individual skills. By knowing what a person did well, we were able to route work to them that matched their strengths. And we discovered that organised work provides great performance data. Our teams could see how well they were performing, and which had the best approach to delivering quality and productivity. People could now collaborate to make everyone better.

But we still had problems with peaks and troughs. Not the forecast peaks – we were good at managing these. The unplanned peaks resulting from sickness, unusual volume and system downtime could push us into backlog very quickly. But as soon as we went virtual – moving work across the network to the person with the right skill, something miraculous happened. One authority’s unplanned peak was another authority’s unplanned trough. Et voila! The peaks and troughs became much, much flatter.

Virtual sharing was now in place. As well as moving work around automatically, we could measure productivity and quality, control compliance and automate routine transactions.

Productivity improved, error rates reduced and we needed far less contingency to cater for peaks in demand. This had an equally profound effect on our service performance because smoothing the peaks helped us maintain a high degree of consistency even with a much lower cost base.

The challenge now was scale. We were only delivering service to the Liberata BPO customers. If we could attract more authorities, there would be far greater savings opportunities available for everyone. By joining the network, local authorities could deliver savings and resilience without system changes, lengthy procurement cycles staff relocation or upfront investment.

In September 2011, we launched CapacityGRID to the local government market to give local authorities have a new alternative – they can now source their capacity locally, virtually or in combination, buying what they need and selling what they don’t for a whole range of services.

The GRID expands in other ways too as partners join the marketplace to provide products and services that add real value.