How do you integrate the combined knowledge, innovations and solutions from two global companies into a new company with operations in Europe and Asia, in just nine months, with a fully operational business and technology suite built from scratch?
This was the challenge faced by TIAA-CREF and Henderson Global Investors when they announced the launch of TIAA Henderson Real Estate (TH Real Estate) in 2013. This combined their infrastructure in 19 countries into one of the world’s largest real estate funds. TH Real Estate, with more than 90 years of global real estate knowledge and innovative real estate investment solutions, needed to commence trading from April 1, 2014.
They did this by working with a single Managed Network Service provider, allowing for an effective and flexible network that connected their entire infrastructure around the globe and ensuring that TH Real Estate became more agile in responding to business demands. The solution needed to keep their business sustainable and at the same time, be flexible enough to facilitate rapid business growth.
TH Real Estate’s decision to work with a single vendor, a global provider with proven exercise operating in the Asia Pacific region, was based on a realisation that managing multiple service providers would over-stretch and would become a significant burden its operational resources. To work closely with a huge number of service providers, a company would even need to have formed a new department specifically for service and vendor management. Consequently, having a single partner to manage IT assets from A to Z ensured greater ease to manage and less vendor headaches.
Managed Network Services provide valuable time for SMEs and enterprises to focus on their core business, innovating and expanding products. Managed Network Services helps companies to create benefits with their unique values, instead of tending to their own IT networks.
Using a single qualified partner to manage an entire network brings the following benefits to your business:
1. Increased Productivity
Even with limited IT resources, your company will be able to identify the source of a problem faster since you will only need to contact a single provider. A single provider minimises the time spent for identifying a problem.
2. Enhanced Relationship with Customers
Empowering your company’s business with self-service capability via a customer portal. This portal gives the user flexibility, faster resolution and a better ability to explain progress or problems.
3. Worry-Free Network Operations
One of the important factors for a successful services business is the customer experience of service delivery. The delivery process through one partner ensures a consistent service experience across all standard offers. This frees up your company’s resources to focus on core business, rather than worrying about network.
Using a single Managed Network Service provider will also bring the following key business values for your company:
1. CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) Services
It’s like one stop shopping with flexible financing options. It has geographic coverage, and provides a network of distributor and service partners with fewer barriers, less time spent and without the hassle of compatibility issues.
2. Features and Functionalities
Providing an integrated performance report when incidents occur and bringing proactive solutions to the table, consultancy and audit services when your company needs it.
3. Best-in-class Customer Experience
With a single qualified service provider, your company will have the consistency of services level, which covers all multichannel services levels.
4. Customer Portal with Self Service Capability
With the provided integrated customer portal, your team can monitor all services through mobile devices, making the user experience far simpler. An informative dashboard will give you the big picture as well as a detailed status. With better understanding and knowledge of the network status, your team can take better, faster, more effective and more accurate actions.
Today, it’s possible for companies to reduce business costs while improving their customer’s satisfaction through innovation and delivering greater value. Finding the best partner to manage end-to-end network assets is crucial as it will impact your business growth and drive sustainability in the long run. Hence, the strategic points above are a good guide to enable you to select the best partner to enable your business operations.
(April, 2016)