When a Customer Wants a New Provider

This customer provides comprehensive services to hospital-based physicians in many states across the country. Their mission is to provide professionally qualified and experienced teams to help clients achieve efficiency, profitability, and sustainable success.

Although there were no customer service issues, the Senior IT Management team was concerned that their current vendor may not be providing the most cost-effective solution. This was essential to ensure the customer was meeting their commitment to their clients, helping their clients to achieve efficiency, profitability, and sustainable success, and enabling them to remain competitive in the marketplace.

It was decided to begin a project to determine if there was another service provider who could provide excellent service, at a lower cost, with minimal risk.

Finding the Right Service Provider

An internal review resulted in the formulation of a requirements document and determination of all critical criteria. The customer asked each vendor specific questions (in additional to their requirements document response) such as:

• Are you the outsourcer or a third party that’s going to subcontract to another outsourcer?
• Do you have deep talent specific to particular platform environments?

The search began with an initial list of 10 vendors. It was quickly narrowed down to 5 vendors, and responses with budgetary pricing were then requested. This eliminated all but 3 service providers: the incumbent, another Tier-1, and Blue Hill. Whether a vendor was a “Tier 1”, or “Tier 2” considered provider was of less importance to this customer’s management than finding a service provider with specific platform expertise and experience, with good financials, and with a business plan supporting longevity to ensure that they would be in business for a while.

“It was very important and part of the due diligence process to find a service provider partner with a culture that matched ours. Our service provider partner must always go above and beyond and must continually strive to provide good service. In my dual reporting and responsibility role to both the business unit and to the IT corporate side, this is extremely important.”

Challenges

• cost them their savings, and receiving non-personalized care and attention
• However, during the fifteen years of service, this mid-tier provider had been acquired by a Tier-1 provider
• Weren’t feeling valued from their provider
• The applications running on the mainframe delivered critical business services to their customers, and they were looking for a partner that would deliver the specific services at a more affordable cost. Most importantly, personal care and service was a driving factor

Solutions

• cost savings, and receiving more personalized care and attention
• deliver 50% savings with no reduction in quality of service
• maintaining the mainframe data center environment, (running VM/VSE), including a secure and fault tolerant hosting facility with ample power and networking, 24×7 operations, production control and job scheduling support, technical support with the in-depth knowledge and experience of running the VM/VSE mainframe systems, tape backup and restore, help desk support, problem management and escalation, Disaster Recovery with two DR tests per year, meeting all required service level agreements (SLAs), project management, and a superior account management team.
• Blue Hill’s flexibility enabled an approach to cut down how long it took to finalize a contract. From the time the decision was made to choose Blue Hill as MMP’s new partner, it was three months to finalize the contract, complete the transition and migration, and be up and fully operational.
• During the migration process, a lot of detailed planning occurred, beginning with a standard plan that was fine-tuned as required.

“Blue Hill met my expectations. Blue Hill’s process is built upon a “classic data center” model methodology, and classic methodologies work. Time has proven that a partnership relationship works very well. From a technical standpoint, the Blue Hill team has shown very good technical skills, there’s no question about it. The outcome was exactly as we planned and prepared for, a migration that was transparent and non-disruptive to the business! …and our annual expenditures decreased by over 50%.”