5th May 2004
Nottingham-based IT outsourcer, Digica, today announced it has signed a new three-year IT outsourcing contract, worth £2.5m, with Dairy Crest. Under the terms of the new deal, Digica will provide Dairy Crest with hosted infrastructure management of Midrange server services and applications support, expanding on the existing longstanding relationship between the two companies.
Dairy Crest is the UK's leading chilled dairy foods company and owns household brands such as Clover, Cathedral City, Utterly Butterly, Frijj and St Ivel Gold. It employs 7,000 people at locations around the UK and serves both the retail grocery trade and major food manufacturers.
Dairy Crest has successfully outsourced the first level support of its JBA Order Processing and Financials, and Prism Manufacturing software to Digica for the last six years. This service included the development and implementation of related interfaces between these applications. Dairy Crest has now contracted Digica also to provide IT infrastructure support and management of its mid-range servers on which Dairy Crest's applications reside, as well as a 24 x 7 Helpdesk facility. Digica will be ensuring Dairy Crest's applications are available around the clock by mirroring the servers in a separate data centre. This will provide Dairy Crest with a high availability disaster recovery solution in the event of any power failures.
“As a food and drink specialist, we understood at an early stage that our core activity is not the management of IT systems, therefore we have outsourced this function for the last six years,” said Karina Heys, IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager at Dairy Crest.
Karina Heys continued: “Throughout our six-year relationship, Digica has demonstrated its ability to excel in its service delivery to us. We require exceptional resilience, as the IT that Digica supports is vital to enable Dairy Crest to maintain its own high standards of Customer Service. No other company demonstrated the same data centre capability. Add to that, an exceptional record in the food and drink industry, and Digica was the natural choice for us.”
“The food and drink industry is a round-the-clock operation that requires a highly-resilient IT function to support it,” said Mark Howling, chief executive officer of Digica. “Our ability to provide a 24/7 service for Dairy Crest was part of the reason for winning this new deal. We are delighted by the fact that Dairy Crest has decided to expand its relationship with us and extend our contract beyond the existing scope.”
“Digica has shown continued commitment to improving the value for money service they provide, and I was happy to renew the contract for an extended period”
David Batts, Business Systems Director, Dairy Crest