Equant

Undertook a supplier selection for an e-procurement system for this very large multinational group organisation with a combined income of US $4.6 billion and 7,000 staff. The aim was to handle the two key sister organisations, Equant and SITA's requirements, replacing GILDA, an ageing IBM DB2 mainframe systems. Equant, the commercial arm and SITA the organisation responsible for handling the worlds airlines' shared communications network. Equant was formed in 1990 from SITA Telecoms Holdings (Societe Internationale Telecommunications Aeronautique) to develop and market the SITA network commercially. SITA was formed in 1949 and owned by the world's airlines to handle their networking requirements in over 220 countries.

The final software and implementation solution was budgeted at £3,000,000, with an expected payback in only 3-4 years. Developed high level user requirements and completed a supplier selection to handle very high volume purchase requisitions, orders and invoices. The brief was to identify one or more solutions, ideally a package or packages, to meet as close a fit as practical, with around 80% of the key needs being delivered. The projected culminating in the selection of a PeopleSoft solution.

In 2002 Equant, which then comprised of four main divisions; Equant Network Services, Equant Integration Services, Equant Application Services and Equant Network Operations, was sold to French Telecom and a further e-procurement selection exercise was undertaken for Equant resulting in an Oracle Financials and e-procurement solution.

As a sub-project responsible for the design and build of an interface from SunSystems to Oracle Financials.

Location: World wide
Type of business: Telecommunications