With the numerous challenges companies have been facing during the pandemic, Alten has found new ways to adapt its services and continues to deliver the best support possible to our customers. In this interview, Antony W., Technical Director at Alten Ltd, explains how our company reacted using innovative solutions and a high level of expertise.
How has ALTEN supported its customers through the COVID-19 crisis?
Through collaboration with our customers, ALTEN ensured that we reacted to the situation as it evolved, ensuring delivery continuity without any degradation of service. Our approach hinged on three themes – protecting our people; securing a continuous service for our customer and adapting for the future to help our customers thrive once restrictions begin to ease.
.Protecting our people
ALTEN quickly reacted to the emerging situation, in the first instance we stopped all non-essential travel and closed our facilities, this meant a tremendous strain on our support functions to bring appropriate hardware and software and in some cases furniture to enable working from home for all our employees – a feat that was achieved within weeks.
.Securing a continuous service
Once work from home was fully enabled, further tailoring of our operational processes and project governance were required to ensure we monitored and controlled our delivery, whilst working in a remote environment. Through the technical direction, new internal reporting rituals were installed and virtual collaborative spaces created to ensure that team synergies were maintained.
The real measure of success is how ALTEN engineers were able to translate the productivity seen at ALTEN delivery centres to a remote working environment whilst maintaining continuity and the high levels of delivery performance associated with ALTEN teams.
How is ALTEN helping its customers bounce back following the COVID-19 crisis?
In the months since lockdown, ALTEN has brought flexibility to our customers, providing them with the right solution at the right time and supported them to ensure business continuity in an ever-changing environment. We have invested in infrastructure to support a return to the workplace in a safe environment and made plans to deploy the first ALTEN Innovation Lab in the UK by January 2021 at our Derby Delivery centre “The Hive”. We have matured our customer offer in consideration of new customer expectations, bringing them:
.A change of approach
It is clear that our customers are looking at more strategic outsource partnerships, a step change from a “bums on seats to heads on shoulders” approach. ALTEN’s offer is tailored to bring high level resourcing, with the added values of maintaining knowledge through ALTEN’s centres of competence, the maturity of the operating model designed to ensure quality and delivery performance managed by ALTEN’s Technical Direction with fixed price commitment thus transferring the delivery risk from our customers to ALTEN.
.Supporting the development of new capabilities
ALTEN Engineers are our most valuable asset. With a permanent resource pool at an academic baseline of a Masters degree, and after a selective recruitment process based on technical, soft skills and values, our engineers deliver more than just the baseline engineering output. They are continually innovating, driving process improvements through automation to bring added value to our customers. ALTEN developed the centres of competence to advance the capabilities of our teams continually. They are also leading junior development programs such as “ALTEN Academy” and “Graduate Program”. Plus, these centres enable us to meet new technology requirements such as Electrification through collaboration with Universities and supporting Industry partners and initiatives.
.Supporting the digital evolution
Through the ALTEN Innovation Labs, we deliver the very best service to support our customers in their digital endeavours. We launched numerous self-funded projects aligned to our customers’ technology strategies covering digital themes such as IoT, AI, Digital Twin, Big data, Industry 4.0 and Cyber Security. ALTEN invests in identifying and developing proof of concepts to solve customer pain points, developing ALTEN’s solution further as a strategic partner.
