Global Healthcare Distributor workplace as a service

Operating model innovation drives agility during rapid non-organic expansion of global healthcare distributor

Challenge

Our client, a leading global healthcare and pharmaceutical wholesaler/distributor, was facing operational strain and technology debt following an extended period of non-organic growth. Simultaneously, client executive leadership had planted a public flag committing to drive employee engagement and attract talent with workplace and journey to digital as a plank in the corporate strategy. Supported by an ad hoc project approach, service levels for workplace infrastructure deployment projects were not adequate to satisfy increasingly short time to market requirements from the businesses, and delays and problems move-in days were starting to affect employee experience in key properties.

The client engaged CSTechnology to identify alternative approaches to supporting corporate workplace programs in order to deliver on the employee engagement strategy and to keep pace with rapid M&A activity.

Goals

In retaining CST, our client was seeking to:

Simplify and standardize how CRE and HR plan for technology elements in larger scope real estate projects
Improve budgeting accuracy and consistency
Drive higher technology throughput for CRE initiatives
Increase organizational ability to leverage digital workplace advances and therefore attract more digital-savvy talent

Solution

Working together with the client’s CRE technology PMO along with several infrastructure pillars across the technology organization, CST productized the end-to-end technology activities needed to deliver a corporate workplace project, and packaged the activities, milestones, and stage gates into a managed service for the client, creating a continuous-service operating model that supports workplace initiatives from pre-capital allocation through to post-move-in support.

The broad set of activities addressed by the offering include shared service financial and vendor administration, agile demand management, and on-site concierge project oversight. On behalf of the client, CST program team members conduct budgeting, sourcing of contractors, on-site construction administration, contract negotiations, relocation planning, and communication between the workplace technology teams and Corporate Real Estate and Human Resources.

Results

Since workplace as a service was launched, our client’s CRE and HR organizations have a single throat to choke for the technology elements of workplace projects. Stakeholders benefit from faster, more efficient technology provisioning processes and a new, lower cost, cloud-based service request procedure that increases consistency of execution by the shared service team as well as teams in the field.

Since first launching in 2016, CST’s workplace as a service offer has delivered dozens of workplace projects and has continued to drive efficiencies, decrease time to move in, and increase the employee experience of moving to new or renovated workspace.