RS Components started in a London garage in 1937, where visionaries J.H. Waring and P.M. Sebestyen founded Radiospares Limited.
They dreamed of supplying radio repair shops with essential spare parts. By 1954, it had expanded into selling electronic components, and in 1971, it evolved into RS Components, marking a new era of innovation.
Since then, it has established operations in 36 countries, surpassing £1 billion in online revenue by 2017, and uniting the entire group under one brand in 2023. Today, RS offers global access to a selection of over 800,000 stocked industrial and electronic products, sourced from over 2,500 suppliers, and offer a wide range of value-added solutions to over one million customers.
The challenge
The business’s rapid growth in recent years had raised concerns about the existing technical service support models and how effectively support issues were managed.
The business recognised the importance of adopting a flexible IT strategy that would define a service journey, incorporating a Service Design & Introduction capability within the IT department to transition from a reactive ‘fire-and-forget’ approach to a proactive service model.
Embedding a service way approach
RS Components turned to Leading Resolutions to provide expert business analysis capability to advise and guide the programme to deliver major organisational and operational change.
Leading Resolutions, a UK technology consultancy, supports its clients with strategies and solutions that streamline operations, enhance productivity and ensure the reliability of IT services.
Pete Smyth, CEO, Leading Resolutions commented: “Far from being a mere facilitation tool for day-to-day operations, an adept IT Strategy is the bedrock upon which the success of an organisation is built. It sets the tone, pace, structure, and priorities, orchestrating how business objectives are not only envisioned but achieved.”
The work to date has consisted of three projects:
- SD&I Documentation and Team Set Up
- Legacy Systems Documentation
- Assessing the risk of Shadow IT
Service design and introduction is crucial in minimising the impact of a service going live and ensuring all security gaps and risks are identified and addressed. For all new projects – whether it be a new service or an enhancement to an existing service – a service design team member acts as the gatekeeper of the service to the company to ensure the project is ready to go live, using tools such as service impact assessments to look at SLAs, challenges, data sources etc.
Service Design and Introduction are key players in the go/no go decisions and are responsible for early life support before the hand off to the service or business owner. This is the ‘Best Practice’ model, and one RS Components aspired to.
Leading Resolutions was therefore brought in to introduce a robust service design and introduction framework and capability into RS Components.
Smyth continued: “We adapted and implemented ITIL documentation around service design and introduction such as service impact assessment and service design as well as bringing in new ways of working to ensure that service design and project management worked together at the very early stages of a project.”
The documentation was designed and then tested against two big projects – transition of telephony services and the move from Atos to a new CCS service desk.
“This enabled us to provide evidence that our SD&I approach worked and we were asked to recruit permanent SD&I staff – from creation of the job adverts through to interview, training and induction into RS Components,” continued Smyth.
Leading Resolutions then reinforced the importance of structured SD&I to improve project delivery, providing the right data to underpin solution design and minimise risk to the business.
The Service Delivery Manager at RS Components added: “Leading Resolutions introduced a ‘service way’ of thinking into the organisation and a structured approach to service design and introduction to minimise risk to the company which we lacked. In addition, by providing ongoing support and coaching to ensure that the new processes and new staff were fully embedded into the business.”
Shining light on legacy systems
Building on the successful work to build the SD&I foundations, Leading Resolutions were then asked to look at the legacy systems documentation.
“Although the systems were supported, the knowledge around the systems was stored within the heads of individuals; there was no service documentation or support manuals, no defined standards and it was difficult to ascertain critical information such as the out of hours support process should any system fall over,” continued Smyth.
The application architectural landscape itself was very complex. Leading Resolutions therefore recommended an initial focus on 40 priority systems from the full list of around 200, many of which were internally developed. Leading Resolutions created an approach which used a defined set of target questions to enable us to fully understand the desired output and capture the details required.
“We captured the risks and security issues around each system to understand the impact on the business should the system go down if a new project went live. To provide full visibility to the client, and ensure they had confidence in the process and outputs, we held regular meetings to review the outputs and progress to date, creating the service design documentation, support model documentation and support model on a page for each system; on our recommendation, there was a peer review of all documents,” added Smyth.
In delivering a set of service and support documentation to remove the dependency on individuals and reduce the risk of system downtime and business impact, Leading Resolutions was then able to identify systems that had been decommissioned and no longer required support as well as those business-critical sales system that needed specific focus given its scale and complexity.
Assessing the risk of Shadow IT
Over the years a high number of applications had been created within the business functions with no provision for IT support. Many of these applications had become integral to day-to-day operations and, as the lack of IT support was a risk to the business, the scale and potential seriousness of the issue was becoming clear.
Driven by the arrival of a new CIO, who wanted to ensure that there was a strong support structure implemented across the board, Leading Resolutions were engaged to look at all the business functions using unsupported and direct procured, applications, to understand and document what applications existed with no IT support and put the appropriate documentation in place.
Leading Resolutions defined a flexible service to enable the project to move forward, building on the work completed around service documentation and support models.
“During the process, more applications were identified and the initial list of 200-300 grew to 400+. With input from the service management team and key head of function owners, we prioritised the applications and then based on both our findings, and the priorities called out by the business, we worked with the Head of Service Operations to recommend the list of apps to be brought into IT. Following a risk-based discussion of this list with the CIO, the Heads of functions were informed of the cost and timing to add the applications to the portfolio.
“At Leading Resolutions, we pride ourselves on our ability to navigate such intricate transformations. Our strategy encompassed a holistic review of the company’s current operations, identification of potential synergies, and the implementation of a robust that supports both the separation and future growth plans. This included modernising the IT infrastructure, and separating data and the associated data analytics tools to ensure continuity of the business decision-making processes,” concluded Smyth.
