OH WHAT A NIGHT we had over at the Titanic Hotel in Liverpool for the Future Vision Awards 2023. A huge thank you to everyone who attended and to all the winners of the Future Vision Awards.
From all of us at SSF UK CONGRATULATIONS to the following members:
ELLA WARREN, HR Administrator, Kier Group
Ella, and her assistance dog Moose, joined us last April, and has been fantastic. Alongside her day job, Ella works tirelessly on initiatives which benefit the wider community, particularly people with disabilities.
She is now Chair of the Board for charity ‘Whizz Kidz’, which advises on improving disability access for young wheelchair users. She works with the Wheelchair Alliance Board and Activity Alliance to improve NHS wheelchair provision and increase representation and participation of disabled people in sport.
Ella also engages with policymakers, including speaking at the House of Lords and meeting with the Shadow Cabinet and Transport for London representatives to discuss improving travel access and equality for disabled bus pass holders. Ella also works with organisations to improve D&I, including Eurostar, Barratts, Unite and Sheffield Hallam University. Last year, Ella completed the London Marathon to raise money for Whizz Kidz and members of our team were there to cheer her on. Working with Ella has helped us introduce new features to our office to make it more accessible which we hope will benefit many more colleagues.
Ella is an inspiration to all of us, and she continues to have a far-reaching impact on her immediate colleagues, Kier and beyond.
GARY HOLLINGTON - Shared Service Director, Rhenus Logistics
With his vision he has and is still changing and challenging our SSC to deliver high standards to our customers but also to our employees of making the SSC a positive place to work. Our employee feedback has increased overall by 61% since Gary became our Finance Director, which is an astounding achievement in a year.
He successfully delivered a number of projects whilst leading his departments through some turbulent times such as Building our SSC Strategy, Implementing SLA’s, Building and delivering KPI’s, implementing new payroll system, initiating strong 360 communication links between the customers and SSC by implementing ‘Jour Fixe’ customer reporting each month where the customers also feel heard and understood.
He visited/built relationships with other Rhenus countries to share ideas and best practices across the globe which has provided a strong link and trusted communication for our customers. He was Nominated for a place on the ‘Global Finance Steering Board’. We are still very much on our journey to stabilising and standardising our SSC but we wouldn’t have achieved half of it without Gary’s leadership.
All Wales Scan for Safety Team, NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership
Enabling transformation: The team have delivered a robust, cyber resilient set of servers with real-time interfacing between SupplyX and Oracle to automate ordering of products enabling health boards to stop labour intensive manual ordering whilst increasing much needed stock visibility. In collaboration with DHCW and local IT leads the team have implemented real-time feeds from PAS to SupplyX to enable digital linkage of product and patient data at point of care, meaning product/patient recalls will become much faster whilst improving patient safety. Scanned data signals will also enable improved/faster decision making and transform patient level costing.
Showing others the way through vision: The team and especially the Business Partners are working with stakeholders in each health board across clinical, supply teams, procurement, finance and IT/IG to drive adoption. Communication of their vision to improve patient safety and their enthusiasm for Scan for Safety benefits has been vital in building and sustaining momentum.
Operational Excellence Team - DS Smith
In under 12 months, the CI team have saved the business over 5,000 hours per annum (£400k) implementing the ‘Small Change, Big Difference’ programme which has added over 50 new project and improvement ideas. This platform has given all colleagues a voice to put forward departmental ideas and highlight the positive ‘Small Changes’ they have made to their roles.
Driving interdepartmental collaboration, the team has introduced ‘Learning Together’ talks to generate new ideas, embrace change, and give greater visibility to business wide practises. This ensures everyone is fully engaged in process changes and standardisation. Alongside the introduction of operational KPI reporting earlier this year, these measures have given a great platform to focus on the right opportunities for the future.
The appetite for change and improvement across the SSC is vast, with teams excited for what the future has to offer. The ambition of the OpEx team is to continue supporting Business Services to further identify automation opportunities and implement a digital roadmap as well as rolling out Global RPA to all Regions across DS Smith.
Joanne Fletcher, Ellie Christian, James Goode, BAE Systems
The journey to getting assistive technology was long and sometimes lonely for many colleagues. The process varied across networks and locations, people didn’t know where to go, they might finally get software/peripherals only to find security/licence restrictions blocked them!
We spoke to colleagues who: spent hours of their own time double-checking work; felt there was a stigma around/were ashamed to disclose their condition; had a degenerative disease and were struggling to operate their mouse/keyboard.
We embarked on a mission to have a single process for all colleagues enabling easy access to accessibility IT/advice/training. Nothing would stop us… we overcame many challenges, carried on fighting and now have a simple process for obtaining essential IT.
With external accessibility experts, internal process experts and a combination of hard-work and ingenuity we’re growing a catalogue of assistive technology, now obtainable in a few simple steps.
We’ve had ups and downs; headsets (surprisingly simple to hack); text-to-voice software that talks to twitter (a big no!); mind-mapping software for use on submarines (a big yes!) and a microphone/speaker for hearing aids (hackable again). We found solutions and carried on.
Providing life-changing tools has helped colleagues dispel the stigma, remove frustration and be proud, productive and purposeful. Our journey continues, we look forward to hearing ‘you’ve changed my life’ (and meeting puppies) many more times.
ER Case Management Team, BT Group
Simplifying the UX with one case management platform across all our brands, instead of three and Data Led with an MI dashboard to help the business spot themes and trends, ensuring consistency and define interventions. The team identified a partner, Adviser Plus and co-designing digitised guided journey’s anchored to our policy and procedures, a knowledge portal, dashboard and MI suite with an advice line for when things become tricky who were wholly immersed into our culture and ways of working. This necessitated OD work which the team owned by virtue of what they do, which outsourced the volume processes to our partner retaining a smaller more senior team of ER Professionals for the more complex, sensitive case types and to be closer to our customer, sharing actionable insights and interventions from cases, so we continually collaborate to improve as a business.
The team’s professionalism and dedication in change implementation and supporting the business into adoption and continuous improvement has been exceptional with manager adoption currently at 93%, and following knowledge sessions 90% being clearer on where to go to get ER support, over 90% being comfortable with using guided journeys and 90% advice first time. notwithstanding significant cost transformation.
Shared Services Connected Limited
To help achieve this objective SSCL is investing in projects that reduce GHG emissions, delivering Sustainable Digital solutions that help our customers achieve their sustainability objectives, and implementing controls and technologies that reduce the GHG emissions associated with the company’s services.
Sustainable Digital is a set of techniques that aim to reduce the environmental footprint of digital activities. This involves various actions such as applying eco-design principles to the core of digital IT development to reduce its carbon footprint. This in turn contributes to a healthy planet that enables people and organisations to thrive now and in the future by reducing environmental impact and providing green services and solutions.
Eco-design has been applied to our latest digital-forms programme, replacing inaccessible, time consuming, locally stored excel forms with cloud based webforms. The simple, clear and AT accessible form design and the overall shortening of the end-to-end process has resulted in our AT users finally being able to submit their own personal HR requests, as well as ever increasing CO2 emissions savings.
Conservative estimates since the initial forms were deployed show savings of over ½ tonne of CO2, increasing further as new forms are deployed and our user base increases.
Tom Napier, Amey
Tom has improved the performance of his team through effective coaching and feedback. He fosterers a positive and collaborative work environment, where his team members feel valued and supported. Tom’s efforts have not gone unnoticed by the client, who have given amazing feedback on the improvement’s and in Tom’s leadership skills.
Tom had been auditing 100% of all tasks to ensure the quality of the tasks being raised by his team. The feedback from the client was that they were so confident in the performance of the team they requested that the audits should be reduced to 20%. This was great recognition of Toms hard work, which was achieved whilst he was acting Team Leader in a development role. Tom has now been successful at interview and is now in a substantive team leader position. Tom continues to excel and inspire others; he is a role model for his peers and a valuable asset for our shared service centre.
Tom deserves to be recognised for his outstanding achievements and contributions, he exemplifies our values and vision. I strongly recommend him for the Rising Star Award.
We hoped you all enjoyed a wonderful evening and look forward to seeing you all again in 2024.
