IDE and Agilitas Strategic Partnership Delivers Premium Customer Service

The relationship between IDE and Agilitas has mutually grown over a number of years, with business transactions dating back to 2014. Starting in July 2016, the partnership took a significant step forward, after seeing both companies falling under new ownership. Strategically this meant that both Agilitas and IDE were looking for means to adopt new ideas and cement their leading market positions for the future.

When conversations between the two surrounding the current partnership began in January 2016, IDE were facing three key challenges:

• Deliver an enhanced premium service to customers
• Reduce the supply chain of technology suppliers
• Consolidation of two existing business operations into one

The company’s aim in early 2016 was to build on their strong field and onsite capabilities and drive the business forward, trebling revenue within three years. The deal signed in July 2016 for Agilitas to provide its InventoryAssure product was designed to support IDE as they look to meet this target.

IDE had traditionally provided full IT support to customers themselves, storing IT spare parts in their own large warehouses, ready to send out with an engineer to a customer site when a hardware fault occurred. The challenge this presents is that it’s not only very expensive to operate, but is difficult to scale for a single company, as meeting tight SLAs requires a large investment in IT stock across multiple locations within reach of all customer sites. To offer a truly premium service to customers, IDE would be required to invest in a vast infrastructure of IT parts, storage and logistics in order to fulfil their ever-growing customer base.

Agilitas’ expertise in inventory management working together with IDE’s engineers meant that the companies would be able to provide IT parts and engineering support contracts to IDE customers delivering up to two hour SLAs. This was set to be further supported by engineer upskilling through Agilitas’ in-house training centre that included knowledge transfer across HP EVA and MSA Storage, Cisco Networking, HP Blade Server and Dell EqualLogic.

Working together, both IDE and Agilitas have been able to build reciprocal value, with Agilitas significantly contributing to IDE’s premium service, through delivering a consolidated supply chain, increased spares availability and an upskilled technical team.

A significant differentiator for IDE selecting Agilitas as their strategic partner was their ability to provide a streamlined onboarding process that addressed the challenges of data integration and asset management across their customer install base.

Management by Agilitas’ Business Take On and Commercial Teams ensured the transition of service from IDE into Agilitas was implemented with minimal disruption to the end user customer.

By outsourcing parts management to Agilitas, IDE has been able to reduce costs by up to 18%. In addition, with engineers continually being upskilled by Agilitas technical training experts, the company has improved engineer utilisation, helping to streamline operations and reduce the skills gap.

The training function has so far helped to upskill over 30 IDE engineers resulting in significantly better engineer utilisation, increased staff retention and removing the need for IDE to subcontract engineering resource. Upskilling the technical teams also means an increased number of faults get resolved first time, therefore increasing customer loyalty whilst reducing operational costs.

By investing in Agilitas’ InventoryAssure service, IDE has also been able to move over to an OPEX rather than CAPEX outsourcing model, supporting budget challenges and ensuring their service remains both scalable and flexible.