Client case: From local management to one global IT service provider
We recently shared some nice pictures from Malaysia, where one of our transition managers was working on an international transition on location. This project has now been completed and we would like to provide a little more substantive information. We carried out a transition from several IT service providers to one global partner for the customer. First in Europe, then in Asia.
Our customer: Nexperia, a semiconductor manufacturer which was founded in 2017 as an independent company after splitting from NXP. Nexperia’s main office is located in Nijmegen. There are also branches in Budapest and Taipei, five large production facilities in EMEA (Great Britain, Germany) and APAC (China, Malaysia and the Philippines), as well as various sales sites distributed throughout the world.
The starting situation
The IT infrastructure management used to be invested with various international and local parties, as well as partly internally. Nexperia decided to globally consolidate this management with one IT service provider at the end of 2017. The new partner was found in an international party, located in Mumbai in India.
A transition project was started under André Jongejan’s management, head of IT Enterprise Infrastructure at Nexperia. Transition Experts was approached to supervise the transition on behalf of Nexperia in January 2018. Our transition manager started his role that same month.
What I like about Transition Experts is that we can make any required changes quickly, because they themselves are hands-on too. If I am in need support, another supplier would provide me with at least 10 CV’s, which I would then need to make a selection from. But Transition Experts only puts one or two people forward and I will know in advance these will both almost certainly be a match. That saves everyone a great deal of time and effort.
Quick changes, collaborating well
This project is a good example of making quick changes: our transition manager started work less than two weeks after the initial contact. This was certainly necessary too, as the transition of services for the European branches was 1 April 2018. A tight deadline which resulted in the necessary challenges.
The short timeline required a well coordinated collaboration between the three parties involved: the leaving party, the receiving party and Nexperia itself. The new IT service provider from India’s transition manager visited the Netherlands and Germany for a few weeks in order to realise this.
The transition of the Asian branches started after the transition of the European services. A transition date on 1 July 2018 was included in the planning for this purpose. An important difference with the European sites: this end date was not rigidly linked to expiring contracts. However, the Asian branches knew every other IT service provider, or they organised the IT infra management themselves internally. Our transition manager left for Malaysia for almost four months, making sure matters in Asia were kept on track.
I often worked from the head office in Nijmegen during the initial period, with regular visits to the production facilities in Hamburg. Once the European transition was completed, I worked on the transition in Asia at one of the large production locations in Malaysia for a few months. Fantastic to work in a completely different environment. An experience I had not wanted to miss.
Bumps along the road…
Every project has challenges, and this transition is no different. The main thing was the short timespan, resulting in insufficient time for a thorough transition preparation. In retrospect, the IT service provider should not have accepted this short time frame and should have demanded more time for the start-up phase.
In practice, you see this reflected in the lead time for supplying suitable on-site employees: native German is a requirement at the production facilities in Germany and the Indian IT service provider obviously couldn’t simply supply these employees from ‘stock’. Visa problems also played a role in this.
Another important lesson: make sure a fully-fledged transition manager is (also!) available on the supplier’s side. The supplier put forward various transition managers for this project who were insufficiently experienced or suitable. A waste of everyone’s time. This could have been prevented if the IT service provider had worked on the preparatory period more efficiently.
And now, moving on!
The transition has been completed. Nexperia opted to continue to execute part of the IT infrastructure management with its own employees. This will give the IT service provider more time to get the right people in the right place. This ensures the quality of the services supplied, in any case in the short-term, can relatively easily be guaranteed.
The quality of the second and third line support was under considerable pressure, in particular due to the limited amount of English spoken by the employees in India. In addition, it appeared the employees in India work for several customers at the same time and could not meet the expected pattern. A transformation route has already been started in order to further optimise the quality and to allow the second line and third line support to be carried out by so-called dedicated teams.
The transition by Transition Experts has been completed entirely satisfactorily.
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