University of Manchester – delivering four times faster

The university wanted to grow its offering in the nuclear sector quickly. These programmes typically took four years to launch, so engaged us. The first students joined lectures just 11 months after start.  The professional Masters programme in Nuclear Technology Management was the world’s first, with a new web portal pulling together all nuclear teaching at the University across different schools and departments, e-learning and digital communication technologies for ‘blended learning’ and remote delivery. This course was endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Working Links Ltd - Transforming IT service satisfaction

We worked with the CIO and IT management team of this Welfare-to-Work provider to introduce a business focused culture and Agile methods to the IT department, to double their delivery performance and improve business user satisfaction.

High Street Bank - AI for lending management

We proved data mining software for a major bank in less than a week, showing  how machine learning technology could improve their lending management performance and cut costs.

Unilever R & D - robotic cells to enhance product development

We built on Unilever's experimental results in robotic cells in their global R & D laboratory to plan for the commercial use at scale of laboratory robotics.

OpenClinical CIC  - shaping innovative digital healthcare

We are working with this specialist community interest company, applying for innovation funding to transform the way that clinical knowledge is captured, shared and applied. This draws on our long AI and machine-leaning track record, and combines it with our NHS and healthcare expertise. This has forced a critical review of their strategy, looking at growth and wider exploitation, through working with their board.

NHS - delivering cost-effective digital healthcare

We helped the NHS to save £65M in the first year alone through putting AI -based advice on-line (in half the expected time). We formed a cohesive team even though people worked across many organisations in the UK.

This digital AI solution helped patients understand their health conditions and advised them how to get the right treatment, avoiding many thousands of wasted GP appointments, going on to win a Queen’s Award for Enterprise.

Cloudis Ltd – boosting innovation capacity

We are working with this well-established software supplier to transform its ability to grow and innovate, while designing and developing a new product with much wider potential market than their current product range. We’re collaborating with Sellafield Ltd to make sure the new product will scale to cover the greatest demands while also ensuring it will be very easy for small businesses to use.

Borregaard and Unilever – balancing innovation with investment

Borregaard, a Norwegian bio-refiner, in partnership with Unilever, won over €25M is European funding to productise and exploit a bio-sourced ingredient, Exilva. We led Unilever’s interest in exploring how Exilva could replace oil-based ingredients in a diverse range of products and packaging, as part of its green strategy This involved coordinating teams working in Brazil, the US, the UK, France, Norway, Sweden and Greece, so was heavily dependent on virtual teamworking long before the COVID-19 crisis. We successfully identified the ways Exilva could enhance the test products, and the commercial challenges to introducing this new type of ingredient.

Lohmann Tapes – targeting innovation

This global leader in its field was facing a steady erosion in its technology lead plus difficulties in growing its sales. To focus on customer needs, we designed and piloted a customer information collection and analysis solution enabling the sales force to collect customer data quickly and easily during site visits. To de-risk and make rapid progress, the pilot used technology already in use, which revealed the challenges to be addressed by a full-scale solution.

Unilever IT – transforming end-user IT

Unilever were looking to make collaborative working easier while reducing the cost and carbon footprint of their fileservers by transforming the way its staff used files. We created a technologically innovative programme to deliver these transformed IT services to 93,000 staff globally while cutting data storage costs by over 50%. This programme was seen as cost-cutting so the major challenge was engage users to bring about lasting change.

BPP – revitalising a programme

BPP's parent, Apollo Global, had an ambitious programme to design and implement a worldwide IT solution to support its business strategy of moving students’ interactions on-line to a fully-integrated digital experience. The Financial IT projects had fallen behind plan so we were asked to assess the situation and put in place a revised plan. This required extensive stakeholder engagement and heavy negotiation to reconcile conflicting expectations.

Vodafone subsidiary THUS - unprecedented success

After acquiring YourComms, THUS set out to move customers from YourComms’ two billing systems onto its own. The project had stalled because of the complexity in processing numerous customer accounts. We took a different approach, focusing on an excellent customer experience and winning early success. This approach was applied to all customers and accounts, concluding with the most complex. As a result, all customers were retained, the critical success criterion.

Shop Direct Group - delivering business benefits on plan

When retailers Shop Direct and Littlewoods were acquired, their buyers’ expectations of an early return on investment quickly began to look unattainable. Projects set up to rationalise warehousing, distribution and ordering processes were delayed due to complex IT issues.

As part of a major restructure, we led a team of systems architects, analysts and software engineers who, with a new plan, went on to implement a successful merger of systems in just 3 months.