Simon Kent examines the decision by Thomas Cook Financial Services to use an external provider based in India to supply some of its IT services...
Software Source, 03 Dec 2002
Thomas Cook Financial Services (TCFS) runs the world’s largest network of retail foreign exchange bureaux and has a substantial slice of the international money transfer market. But further growth was being hampered by the 17 different legacy systems supporting its work.
The company decided to invest in a single Windows-based platform support functions across the organisation. Due to the scale of the task it decided to bring in an external provider to help with the project.
"Wipro Technologies was chosen as they fulfilled all of our selection criteria and were interested in a flexible working partnership with us, rather than trying to dictate procedure and assume total management control of the project," says Neil Hammon, head of development at TCFS. "We were slightly nervous about outsourcing our software development overseas but Wipro’s methodology for quality control in software development and project delivery reassured us."
Wipro recruited the extra staff required very quickly and assembled the usual onshore-offshore team split between TCFS headquarters in Peterborough and Wipro’s development centre in Bangalore. The team consisted of a project manager, five analysts, 33 programmers and nine quality-control personnel.
Design and development was completed in six months with full delivery eight months later. The new system processes up to 3,000 orders an hour - more than three times the previous maximum.
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