Parity wins IT consultancy contract with British American Tobacco

    /24-7PressRelease/ - EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, March 17, 2006 - British American Tobacco, the international tobacco group, has signed a new contract with IT Solution provider, Parity. The three-year framework agreement has a fixed value of 3 million, with additional business process consultancy and IT Business Solution development projects bringing the total value to an estimated 6 million.

Parity will provide application management services (http://www.parity.net/solutions/solutions/applications_management/default.aspx ) for business and project-specific applications. It will exploit the knowledge it has gained across the enterprise to help optimise IT management projects that improve business processes and make cost and time savings.

Parity has been working with British American Tobacco for over six years. The contract was due to be put out to tender for the start of 2006. By proving that it could introduce new initiatives and working methods to substantially improve the value it could offer, Parity won back the existing work and a framework agreement to provide additional IT Solution services (www.parity.net/solutions ).

Thomas Moore, Commercial head of British American Tobacco's Global Services Division, commented: "Parity has shown that it can adapt to our new demands and add value to our business. We are confident that this relationship will bring about the efficiency in IT that the company needs to continue to thrive."

"We have streamlined our organisation and completely reshaped our engagement model to justify British American Tobacco's renewed confidence in Parity. We were determined to innovate and re-energise the way we worked together," said Alan Feast, British American Tobacco account director at Parity. "We knew that we had considerable capacity to add further value, and were keen to demonstrate what we could offer, bringing to bear our knowledge of the organisation and management, as well as technical, expertise."

Parity worked hard to ensure it had full support for its new model of engagement. "Parity has re-invented many of the ways it works with us," said David Sampson, Head of HQIT at British American Tobacco. "It has taken on board our new requirements and changes in our internal approach and has proved itself capable of adapting the way it works to match. For many years Parity has been an important partner to HQIT and this contract renewal speaks to an equally bright future"

In the future Parity's staff will work as a virtual extension of the company's internal IT resources on applications management, technical design, programme and project management and business process consultancy (www.parity.net/consulting ).

At present, Parity is working on a portfolio of consulting projects and is supporting 37 applications. Under the new agreement, it will have increased responsibility for deliverables bringing about cost, time and manpower savings with blended teams on and off site. This approach underpins British American Tobacco's overall business drive to rationalise IT suppliers and optimise business processes to deliver substantially increased value.

Editorial notes
About Parity Group Plc:
Parity, uniquely for its size, offers a full range of IT Services to major companies including:

Business process consultancy
IT Training
Management training
Change Management Training
Development and management of complex IT systems
Oracle and Microsoft technology and application skills
Permanent and temporary IT staff

Customers across the group include Alcatel, Allianz, ATandT, British American Tobacco, CISCO, Department for Education and Skills, Department for Work and Pensions, Glaxo Smith Kline, HBOS, Hewlett Packard, HM Revenue and Customs, HSBC, IBM, ICI, Ministry of Defence, NASA, Connecting for Health at the NHS, O2, Perot Systems, Royal Bank of Scotland, Royal Mail, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, The Cabinet Office, The Meteorological Office and T-Systems.

For more information on Parity, visit http://www.parity.net or contact Warren Tsoi ([email protected] )

Author:
Michael Hanna

About Michael
Michael is a keen writer, and internet marketer living in Scotland:

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