Vetasi implement technological solutions to business challenges. Building on the keystones of solution knowledge and business expertise, Vetasi leverage industry-specific experience and expertise to add extra depth to the solution-fit for customers. Bringing together industry specific knowledge and industry templates for ERP and EAM enables Vetasi consultants to provide our clients with innovative solutions for their needs. Vetasi customers from a wide range of industries provide testimony to the successful application of that expertise.

Our industry-specific expertise includes...

• Facilities management / Service Providers
• Utilities
• Oil & Gas
• Life Sciences
• Discrete & Process Manufacturing
• Transport

Service providers, whether they are third party outsourcers or in-house shared service departments, compete in an increasingly aggressive environment to win and keep the contracts that are their life blood. The daily challenge is how to compete most effectively in a market where the number and type of competitors changes daily - where their customers have more and more options - and margins are squeezed ever more tightly.

Services offered range across facilities managementFacilities Management service providers face changing requirements from their customers as corporate procurement policies are moving toward the bundling of soft and hard services from a single provider or group of providers. Increasing regulation combined with increasing competition demands increasing professionalism and contract control., business process outsourcing Business Process Outsourcers are typically specialists in specific business critical internal administration processes and in order to compete, these organisations have to leverage new business models to provide an economically competitive service offering and enhanced service delivery., IT services Traditional IT service providers have had to review the range and type of services offered in the face of competitive pressures due to a reduced number of large contracts, increased numbers and types of competitors, and a reduction in contract sizes. Commoditisation has also steamrollered the hardware and software markets and, to avoid the commoditisation trap and distinguish their services from competitors' offerings, managed service providers need to develop a strategy that involves:

• Building a mature managed services practice that will enable delivery of higher-value services that yield greater profit margins
• Driving down service delivery costs to provide responsive, tools-based services to compete effectively in a commoditised market
• Differentiate through combining best practice and efficient service delivery with vision and innovation and going beyond infrastructure outsourcing to embrace software-as-a-service, utility computing, managed services and specialised hosters
• Build in security assurance to tackle risks that are becoming increasingly sophisticated, common and devastating.
• Ensure good solution alignment to customers' business strategy and requirements.

To win and keep the business, in-house service departments and outsourcers alike must offer their customers two key assurances - cost control and service improvement. Balancing those two competing pressures is key to survival. The pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency is crucial to win contracts and operate profitably, while the pressure to show improved service and response levels is vital to retain that contract.

Vetasi solutions for Service Providers

Vetasi's consultants have been integral to some of the UK's most high-profile outsourcing contracts and have extensive experience in this challenging multi-tiered environment. Vetasi knows that service providers need to make every part of their business focus on reducing costs while improving productivity and increasing service.

Our solutions can help you to:

• Improve operational efficiency to enable faster, smarter decisions
• Respond faster to market changes
• Control your cost structure
• Reduce non-revenue-generating time of employees
• Meet required performance levels
• Reduce revenue deferred due to work in progress
• Service more clients with same staffing
• Understand costs better in order to price more competitively
• Increase customer satisfaction for competitive advantage
• Increase business with existing customer base
• And win contracts for additional value-added services

For information about our customers in the Facilities Management / Service Provider sector, please contact enquiries@vetasi.com

Utilities need to optimise asset reliability and adapt to rapid market changes. They also face high capital costs to furnish upgrades to infrastructure and production assets. Operational efficiency and increased flexibility are key to helping them to respond to new market changes and demands, improve cost effectiveness; and respond to changing regulatory, safety and security requirements.

Water

The water industry in the UK supplies over 20 million properties, directly employs more than 27,000 people and has an annual turnover of around £7bn. Highly regulated, closely watched by consumer bodies and the government alike, the industry is challenged to provide the consistent high quality service the market expects at a price the consumer is prepared to pay. Conflicting demands around climate change, security of supply, environmental impacts and flood protection have to be planned for and the industry faces the requirement to fund a large investment programme going forward. To attract essential funding, it needs to be able to offer rewards to potential investors; which means it has to improve its operating efficiency, increase organisational flexibility and maximise value from its assets.

Energy

The energy market has been going through a period of great change in the UK and across the globe. Energy companies have begun rethinking their business strategies in order to retain market share, manage market volatility and capitalise on new opportunities. Deregulation of the energy market, combined with the convergence of gas and electricity into one market, has led to the transformation of energy companies from regulated monopolies into market-driven suppliers of competitively priced energy and related services. The advance of deregulation opened the industry to competition from home and abroad and also increased demand from consumers for lower priced, innovative products. This has increased the risk faced by energy producers and suppliers, emphasising their need to maximise profits while better managing said risk. Energy Companies need more than ever before to leverage processes and technology to increase their efficiency and ability to respond to the market conditions, and to use all their resources more effectively.

Vetasi Solutions for Utilities

By tailoring solutions to standards, processes and challenges of the diverse utilities industry - and including specific tools and processes the different sectors - Vetasi can help your organisation achieve enterprise-wide visibility to the business activities that are critical to your business to enable better decision-making.

The Vetasi team has extensive experience in the Utility sector. Recent implementations include solutions in the water industry to maximise the performance and return on a wide range of strategic assets - involving configuration and customisation of the customer's system in line with business processes, as well as delivering Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and operational reports, and the creation of a process-specific training programme. In power generation (nuclear and gas turbine), Vetasi implementations have ranged from ensuring compliance with regulatory and safety issues at a nuclear site to gathering data on equipment/location hierarchies from physical identification of assets.

Vetasi solutions can help your utility improve its operational efficiency, mitigate risk and increase profitability, while enabling innovative business models, an integrated value chain and improved customer services. Better decision making in critical business areas can increase organisational flexibility to help you respond to new market changes and demands, improve cost effectiveness and respond swiftly to changing regulatory, safety, and security requirements.

For information about our customers in the Utilities sector, please contact enquiries@vetasi.com

The Oil and Gas sector operates in a volatile market - strongly impacted by access to new resources, the political environment at home and overseas, the global economy and the public attitude to green issues. In the last 2 years, they have experienced a very positive environment. Global demand for crude oil and natural gas is strong, interest rates and cost inflation are low and hydrocarbon prices are at historic highs. As a result, large integrated oil companies and those operating in related sectors have been experiencing record profitability and cash flows, all of which puts them in a good position to make the most of today's growth opportunities and prepare for whatever environment lies ahead. Companies that know how to make the most of today's prosperity can extend their impact for decades to come.

From natural resource through to the end user, the Oil and Gas sector encompasses four very different industries: ‘Upstream’, ‘Supply, Transmission and Trading’, ‘Refining and Manufacturing’ and ‘Downstream Marketing and Retailing’.

Upstream

The exploration, extraction, and production of crude petroleum is costly, risky and complex, requiring specialist engineering scientific and technical expertise. Maintaining a portfolio of assets to ensure access to sufficient reserves of the raw product requires management of the full exploration cycle, long range planning, development of new fields and on-going mergers, acquisitions or joint ventures. Production planning and volume and capacity management are key to ensuring 24/7 production cycles and maximised volumes at the required quality levels. The industry heavily leverages outsourced services and specialist contractors that need to be integrated into the overall processes and managed effectively.

Supply, Transmission and Trading

Bulk supply chain activities feature a number of key activities from initial planning to final settlement that revolve around supply chain management and global trade planning. Bulk supply chain planning and optimisation, operations and scheduling, reporting and analytics, commodity trading, and risk management are all key areas where Vetasi solutions can improve processes and efficiency.

Refining and Manufacturing

Refining and Manufacturing includes the transformation of crude oil into refined, finished products ready to be marketed. Vetasi solutions support process areas such as: refinery operations and Lubes manufacturing operations; to procure and manage crudes, feedstock, and base oils; forecast demand, plan and schedule production; and blending and delivering finished products

Downstream Marketing and Retailing

Fuels marketers and distributors focus on managing margin pressure and price fluctuations, coordinating a fast-paced replenishment cycle and optimising deliveries that rarely correspond to planned orders. Vetasi solutions provide comprehensive support for key marketing and retailing activities, helping to optimise fleet utilisation and fuels delivery while controlling costs and maximising narrow profit margins. Leveraging these effective solutions can also help you to build customer loyalty through strong customer service and reliability, which will in turn support strategic growth.

For information about our customers in the Oil and Gas sector, please contact enquiries@vetasi.com

Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences companies are experiencing a period of unprecedented change. Shifts in age and demographics, the entry of new technology platforms and solutions, increased government regulations and aversion to risk; and the call for lower prices from the market along with rocketing operating costs, are changing the face of the industry. Moreover, increased scrutiny of operational and research practices together with difficult questions over the safety of marketed drugs have created uncertainty in what has traditionally been considered a stable and highly profitable business. The patents on many of the medicines launched in the 1990s will expire over the next few years, leaving many companies very exposed; only four out of ten companies have enough products in their pipelines to fill the impending revenue gap.

These factors raise a number of specific operational issues that companies should address in order to succeed in this changing environment:

• The need to successfully develop innovative drugs and enhance R&D productivity.
  Companies need to move new products into existing and new markets quickly to obtain sufficient benefit from a limited patent life and to compensate for development costs which can exceed $800 million per drug. Effective R&D is a complex mix of science, organisational ability to invest, choice of location based on cost-base or skills availability, recognition of opportunity; and compliance with stringent regulations and strategic decisions on mass-market medicines or speciality therapies. These have a profound bearing on the business models and mix of skills needed to support the company's ability to succeed.
• The need to address the conflicting pressures of pricing and shrinking margins.
  As R&D increases the range of treatments available to treat the nation's illnesses and, as the economy and budgets are squeezed ever tighter, healthcare providers across the UK struggle to budget for an increasing range of costly treatments. Despite the fact that only a small proportion of overall healthcare costs are due to the cost of drugs, pharmaceuticals companies are a relatively easy target for healthcare providers trying to get more out of their budgets. Faced with spiraling operating costs in addition to shrinking margins, it is vital for companies to have efficient control over these costs.
• Reputation management.
  Public perception of pharmaceutical manufacturers has been impacted by a number of recent product recalls. Quality assurance processes and regulatory requirements may become even tighter in order to satisfy demand for the return of public confidence.
• The need to demonstrate regulatory compliance.
  Heightened regulatory scrutiny will challenge the industry to demonstrate regulatory compliance and evidence a comprehensive strategic approach that builds compliance into the fabric of the business.

The implications for the industry are that it must embrace new business models that focus on adapting to the risks and choices available.

Vetasi Solutions for Life Sciences

Vetasi understands the challenges faced by Life Sciences companies in developing new business models to enable strategic partnerships and acquisitions, improve organisational flexibility and speed of response, develop new R&D models, build closer collaboration with regulators and healthcare providers and utilise different channels to market. Vetasi solutions can provide the basis for the transformation by helping to build compliance into core processes, enabling operational excellence from the supplier to the customer and facilitating innovation with partners worldwide to accelerate new product and process development.

Vetasi consultants have extensive experience in the life sciences sector from the management of critical assets to integrating core processes, controlling costs, increasing operational efficiency and ensuring regulatory compliance. Certified in GAMP 5, they understand industry-specific requirements such as:

• FDA compliant to 21CFR part 11
• Calibration and Mobile Calibration functionalities
• Support (asset-related) CAPA
• Compliance Assistance Documentation (in Validation projects)

For information about our customers in the Life Sciences sector, please contact enquiries@vetasi.com

Sustaining growth in an uncertain economy is the key challenge for the Manufacturing sector, which has suffered more than most from the global economic slowdown because of its exposure to international trade. Whilst many high-profile global brands are manufactured in the UK, and our growing skills base and culture of innovation have favoured the rise of a knowledge-intensive manufacturing sector, currency fluctuations have impacted the cost of British exports. More recently the credit squeeze and recession have cut orders in many sectors, increasing the pressures on UK manufacturing organisations to increase business efficiency and sustain growth.

Vetasi Solutions for Manufacturing

Integrating ERP with manufacturing execution systems and automated manufacturing systems running on the shop floor helps you increase business efficiency and reduce the overall cost of manufacturing. Effective asset management can help ensure your operations run to plan and maximise the return from your production assets. Vetasi solutions empower you to integrate commercial, manufacturing and financial processes - so you gain full visibility into operations, manufacturing, customers, suppliers and finance. Our solutions can help you to collaborate with customers and suppliers to respond to changing supply chain and market conditions quickly and cost-effectively; and to ensure that you have sufficient control over your production environment to meet those changing needs. Whether you focus on ERP or EAM, Vetasi can help equip you with the tools to help you prosper and grow.

Vetasi implemented solutions can help you to:

• Optimise planning and manufacturing processes to suit your business requirements.
• Manage procurement processes.
• Integrate core processes with financials.
• Meet customers' expectations for managing their orders.
• Reduce the time and cost of regulatory reporting.
• Provide efficiencies in integrated inventory management.
• Plan deliveries and monitor route business.
• Manage your critical assets to ensure your asset productivity supports business demands.
• Manage your vendor contracts with comprehensive contract management support.
• Collaborate with suppliers and customers.
• Define service offerings and establish service level agreements (SLAs) to help align service levels with business objectives.

For information about our customers in the Manufacturing sector, please contact enquiries@vetasi.com

The key issues for organisations in the transportation sector are efficiency and growth. Faced with the competitive pressures from globalisation, regulatory pressures from government compliance and increasing customer demand for extended services, transportation companies have to build economies of scale, maximise the return from their resources and differentiate themselves from current and potential competitors through innovation and customer service. In addition the management of transportation assets has become increasingly complex due to advances in technology, changes in security, heightened competition and rising costs. This requires a larger focus on strategic asset management to maximise availability and performance of assets.

Vetasi Solutions for Transportation

Effective asset management and streamlined business operations are key to successful and renewed contracts. Vetasi solutions can help you to consolidate IT systems to manage operational complexities and sustain growth, ensuring the maximum performance of all assets critical to the delivery of the service. Vetasi has experience in all the major transport sectors: fleet, aviation, rail and shipping, including stationary plant, mobile, point and linear assets; and can help you to:

• Gain visibility into multiple supply chains.
• Control costs and complexity.
• Provide logistics services on a global scale.
• Create new revenue streams with value-added services.
• Model transportation asset structures and define maintenance regimes.
• Build business process design for work management.
• Optimise asset performance and tracking to help you improve availability and lower the cost of acquisition, maintenance and disposal.
• Improve compliance with transportation industry regulations.
• Consolidate multiple asset management systems for improved oversight of all transportation-related assets
• Leverage built-in industry best practices to improve asset productivity.
• Improve and comply with reporting requirements.