Estate agent giant Sequence prides itself on providing
an integrated end-to-end home moving service. And IT plays a big
part in its success.
- Business description Sequence is a national
chain of estate agencies
- Business challenge Develop a customer focused,
process-based model to streamline the business of moving house and
provide an integrated customer service
- Solution Develop a custom-made web-services
based application that integrates all aspects of house selling and
moving, from property details to finding mortgage and removal
companies, and roll this out to all 2,000 staff
- Services Infrastructure and network design,
technical consultancy, vendor selection, project roll-out,
implementation and installation, project management, 24x7 remote
and on-site network management, helpdesk operation and fault
resolution, liaison with other service providers
The promise of the dot coms was that they would revolutionise
business through changing processes, opening up new markets and
streamlining interaction between customer and provider.
Although clicks failed to replace bricks, the dot com era did
usher in many changes in the ways that established companies chose
to work, particularly with the adoption of the web services model
of full integration between disparate systems.
Looking to a future where the traditional local estate agent is
under threat from a range of on-line services, which range from
property adverts to conveyancing, Sequence, formerly known as Royal
Sun Alliance Property Services, set out to be the first national
chain to deliver an integrated, efficient and rapid end-to-end home
moving service.
Designing the service called for Sequence to look at its
operations from a completely customer-driven perspective and
encapsulate these in a process based on the latest and most
integrated technology.
After an extensive tendering process, it decided to outsource
the design and provision of its branch IT infrastructure with a
three-year support contract to include helpdesk support and
maintenance.
Several of the world’s best known services providers answered
the tender and the contract was awarded to Computacenter.
Sequence is the second largest group of estate agents in the UK.
Its 350 branches include such well-known names as Barnard Marcus,
Fox & Sons and Allen & Harris. Its customers range from
first-time buyers looking for one-bed flats, to those seeking the
most luxurious penthouses and country mansions.
“With such a diverse market you have to tailor your service to a
variety of needs,” says Neil Chandler, Sequence’s chief information
officer. “Intelligent use of technology allows us to set a standard
that offers excellence to all our customers by taking best practice
from different offices and turning it into common practice across
the group.”
Turning aspiration into reality
Turning such lofty aspirations into reality is often much more
of a challenge than at first seems obvious. Chandler readily
agrees. “To deliver such quality across a wide breadth of service,
we had to go back to the drawing board and redesign the whole
process of how our people interact with our customers. It meant
throwing away a lot of preconceptions and introducing some very
innovative ideas.”
The re-branding of Sequence, which accompanied the complete
re-engineering of its business processes was led by Charles Taylor,
the company’s chief executive officer.
“Our plans are about a complete shift in emphasis in the way we
go about our business. We have moved from the traditional
transaction-based estate agency role to one that nurtures long-term
relationships with customers. We want to safeguard the best of our
local inheritance to pave the way for the estate agency of the
future.
“Our entire emphasis will be about delivering the service that
our research has shown customers want. This means our agents are
becoming partners with our customers, acting more as consultants
and guides on the whole home moving process instead of simply being
a finder of a potential new home.”
Comprehensive independent services – the route
forward
Although many people outside the industry are cynical about the
interlinking of financial and other services by estate agencies,
the management board at Sequence is convinced that future events in
the industry will show the wisdom of delivering a comprehensive
service.
As Neil Chandler explains: “The government is talking about
putting the onus for survey and title reporting onto the seller
through the sellers' pack initiative. In addition, many of the
legal processes such as searches and land registry reports will be
on-line within a couple of years. The whole process of buying and
selling property is going to change radically.
“Faced with these changes, as well as strong pressure on
commission rates, we decided that our best route forward was to
redesign our processes to cover every stage of both the sales and
legal side of moving home so we could improve customer service”
He continues, “This approach allows us to introduce some of the
best elements of CRM and move away from the traditional estate
agency model of a single transaction-based process where the
customer has a brief but intense relationship, and is then
forgotten until the next time they move.”
Lessons learned from the dot coms
The business process re-engineering took many of the lessons
learned from internet companies, particularly about flexibility,
speed of response and wider choice, and built these into a new
model for the company supported by a fully web services-enabled
technology.
“This application server/J2EE technology matured during the dot
com period and we have exploited this for our intra-organisation
application. Every detail about every property and customer is held
on a single application and is available to all branches,” explains
Chandler.
“This contains pictures of each property, reports about
people’s requirements, reactions to viewings and progress of a sale
through to its completion. It can be browser accessed by anyone in
the company, regardless of their location, and has been designed to
link to lawyers, mortgage providers, local authorities and the Land
Registry as their technology catches up.
"It is a complete online estate agency application, designed
in-house, that will build on the individual local expertise of each
office to deliver a better and more comprehensive service to our
clients.”
Sequence decided to start with a clean sheet in technology
terms. It prepared a four-part tender for the different aspects of
the service it wanted to give its offices. The first part covered
the application, which was awarded to a joint team made up of
in-house staff from Sequence working with Scient, a systems
integrator.
The second covered the hosting of the application, which was won
by Cable and Wireless, the third was the networking infrastructure
and the fourth covered the branch IT infrastructure which was to be
supplied as a managed service.
Computacenter wins
The infrastructure contract was awarded to Computacenter after
an extremely competitive tender, as Chandler recalls. “One of the
first tests we set was to determine the level of service that
companies were able to offer in terms of providing us with a fully
managed service. We were looking for a tier one provider, so our
initial list included companies such as EDS, IBM Global Services
and BT.
"We were pleasantly surprised to find Computacenter more than
capable of holding its place in such company, and in fact its whole
approach played perfectly into our culture. Eighteen months later I
would have no question about placing Computacenter on a level with
the best-known global names, and ahead of a fair few of them.”
Chandler is a firm believer that outsourcing needs to be
selectively managed to work effectively. “The danger for many CIOs
looking at outsourcing their IT operations is signing themselves
into deals that look good today, but will be hopelessly wrong in a
few years' time.
"Of course you can’t do it all yourself, you have to make
intelligent use of a team, which can be a mixture of your own
people and those from an outside specialist. In any organisation it
is vital that you retain the management and architecture of your
application, especially if you consider it critical to the way you
do business as we do.”
Choose your partners carefully
Chandler also believes CIOs follow a path fraught with danger
when choosing partners. “One lesson that the industry should have
learned from the dot com bubble is the need for financial stability
in the companies on whom you allow your business to depend.
"This is always going to be an issue with smaller companies –
they often have sexy technology but this is of no value if they
disappear after you’ve bought it and you can’t get the support.
Conversely smaller companies bring a flexibility and freshness of
thinking. Once you’re used to that you don’t want to give it up, so
when we set out to find partners we wanted the best of both
worlds.”
“When we chose Computacenter we felt it was because we could
work with the company very well, and that its approach to selective
outsourcing would give us everything we needed, “ he continues.
“Our brief to it was to give us an infrastructure that would
handle our legacy applications as we migrated to the new
application and run the new application when it was ready to be
rolled out. “Computacenter had to design the infrastructure, advise
on the technology, develop the management architecture, physically
build the infrastructure, including branch cabling, install it and
then provide both remote and on-site support for a three-year
period, complete with a full helpdesk service for any technology or
application related calls.”
Simple concept – powerful result
Computacenter’s design was based on a Microsoft Windows 2000
platform using both Active Directory and SMS. Alan Evans, one of
Computacenter’s Microsoft Technical Architects explains the set
up.
"The concept behind Active Directory is simple – wherever you
are physically located in an organisation you can log on and your
own desktop will appear, complete with your own e-mail, personal
documents and system preferences.
"It embodies all the best principles of hot desking with an
exceptional level of security for distributed and mobile
workforces. One of its strongest features is that it allows vital
data on each local branch server to remain synchronised throughout
the entire network.”
Remote management
The implementation of SMS allows all aspects of management of
the network and hardware to be handled from the data centre, in
addition to being able to download software centrally and thus
guarantee that everyone uses the same version of the company’s
business applications.
This naturally helps to bring down support costs, but an even
greater return on investment comes from its remote network
management and fault reporting.
This allows most fault fixing to be handled without the need to
call out an engineer. Often potential faults are noted and fixed
before the user is even aware that something might be about to go
wrong.
In the case of severe problems anywhere on the network, from
domain controller to desktop unit, the helpdesk can take over the
operation of the unit across the network and fix the vast majority
of problems without having to send in an engineer.
In operation, Neil Chandler reports that this approach is
working extremely well. “We have been running with the system now
for about twelve months, and I would say we now get an average of
three or four helpdesk calls per branch per month. That’s less than
half of what I would have expected.”
Robust, reliable and good to look at!
Having settled on a Windows 2000 solution, the next step was the
choice of hardware on which to run it. Chandler recalls this was an
interesting exercise. “We worked on it jointly, but gave
Computacenter a brief that we wanted a system that would be fit for
the job, without too many bells and whistles, because our core
application is entirely web-based.
"It had to be what we described as ‘fit for the purpose’.
Obviously we demanded reliability, so we were not looking for the
cheapest option, but we also had to bear in mind that the desktops
would be very visible to our customers, and with a complete
refurbishment of every branch, we needed them to portray a clean,
modern image.”
The final choice was a complete suite from Compaq. At the
desktop the chosen model was the iPAQ desktop, matched to black LCD
monitors. Additionally within each branch a Compaq entry-level
server was installed to provide Active Directory domain controller
and SMS control services.
All branches were connected to the data centre in Swindon
through Sequence’s existing Frame Relay network, and within the
data centre the AD/SMS server choice is again Compaq.
Here, ProLiant DL380 and 580 enterprise servers provide full
connectivity and active directory management. These have been
configured to allow a high degree of resiliency and fault
tolerance, so that if one is out of service, the system continues
to function for all the active directory domain.
Hard to the deadline
One interesting aspect of the project was the implementation
timescale. The project formally kicked off in March 2001 with an
initial go-live in the first branches planned for November 2001.
This required a very aggressive roll out of the branch
infrastructure.
Charles Taylor had made a promise to his staff that half of the
company’s branches would be refurbished by Christmas 2001, so, as
Rob Turner, the Computacenter project manager recalls, the pressure
was on his team to deliver.
“We faced some challenging moments, not least in integrating
the delivery of practically all Computacenter’s service offerings
to 350 branches whilst they were in the process of being
refurbished. These included installation of network cabling at all
branches, logistics services, installation of servers and desktops,
and the migration of legacy applications and data at the time of
installation.”
Prior to delivery and implementation, all system units were
configured by Computacenter at its Hatfield facility. This reduced
sharply the time taken by the installation teams on site and made a
major contribution to helping Charles Taylor’s promise be met.
Managed support 24x7
As each branch went online it began to enjoy the benefit of
Computacenter’s managed service for the support of its operations.
This is a comprehensive package with Service Level Agreements that
place the onus for achieving rapid fault resolution onto
Computacenter, even if it occurs in a part of the infrastructure
not implemented by them.
Computacenter Account Manager Chris Ellis describes the service.
“We provide the first point of contact for any technology issue
encountered by any member of Sequence staff.
"In the vast majority of cases we can resolve them with first
line support, especially if they are minor technical issues, and
often we can resolve these remotely. We also manage the third party
calls, whether it concerns the data centre, WAN or applications,
until the issue is resolved.”
Chris is also keen to point out that the helpdesk is a very
proactive service. “Our role is far greater than just reacting to
calls from users. We continually monitor the servers, measure
utilisation of processors, memory and storage, and help resolve
potential issues before they become a problem.
"Using the tool suite in our operations centre, we also provide
analysis of server outages, ranging from simple hardware failures
to the WAN dropping its link.”
Total satisfaction
The remainder of Sequence’s branches were refurbished and their
infrastructures updated between January and March, with the last
branch being signed off in April. Since then the system has
delivered on all its promises, and Chandler is happy to report its
success.
“What we set out to do was a massive undertaking, and has
completely re-written the rule book for estate agency. We started
from the view point of embracing change, and looked at how the
technologies that were leading edge for the dot coms of two years
ago could become mainstream for us today.
"There is absolutely no question that we could not have built
this business model without the technology we have deployed. It
does not just underpin our organisation, it is integral to every
aspect of the way we work.
“Because of that our in-branch infrastructure has to be very
reliable. We chose Computacenter to deliver this piece of the
jigsaw because we had confidence in its ability to work with us to
make the right choices, to build an industrial-strength solution
and make sure it keeps us in business day after day.
"It has fulfilled that promise and I am confident it will
continue to do so as our relationship grows over the coming
years.”
This article was part of Computer Weekly's managed services
business channel, sponsored by Computacenter.