Boots Plc
IS&T Divestment of Boots Healthcare International (BHI) to Reckitt Benckiser Plc (RB)
Scenario
Supporting the divestment ot Boots Heathcare International (BHI) to Reckitt Benckiser Plc (RB)
Situation
In 2005 The Boots Company plc declared its intent to divest itself of Boots Healthcare International (BHI) along with those parts of Boots Manufacturing that directly/solely supported BHI.
To support the divested entity Boots included within the offer a number of transition service agreements, these agreements were designed to provide facilities and services to the buyer for a defined period and to allow the buyer time to gracefully transition away from reliance on Boots Plc.
The IS&T Transitional Service Agreement (TSA) was one such agreement and it outlined the existing IS&T services required by BHI and laid out the responsibilities, objectives and protections relating to the ongoing support of BHI. This TSA was designed to be compatible with the existing IS&T processes and worked on the basis that the operational procedures currently in place at the time of sale would continue to operate - in particular the process of managing the third party organisations IBM and Xansa were not intended to change.
In September 2005 Boots IS&T commissioned a programme to be led by Charteris Plc to look into the practicalities of implementing the IS&T TSA. The programme was born out of the need to identify the actions required to achieve a day one position of logical separation for the two organisations and in its turn to allow Boots to commence the delivery and commercial charging for the services provided to the buyer.
On the 7th of October 2005 Boots announced
- Boots Group Plc, the UK’s leading health and beauty company, announced the proposed disposal of Boots Healthcare International, its consumer healthcare business, to Reckitt Benckiser plc.
- Reckitt Benckiser has accepted the Transition Service Agreement as part of the sale conditions and it remains unaltered.
The primary programme goal was to support the sale completion and to commence delivery of service to Reckitt Benckiser; this was significantly constrained by the requirement to not impact the peak high street Christmas trading period. The programme was also hampered by not having access to the buyer until mid to late October to discuss/agree the actual on the ground solutions proposed and as such had to work with a large number of assumptions.
As BHI is a FDA/MHRA regulated business it was fundamental requirement that the programme conform to best practice from a Regulatory and Validatory perspective.
Charteris Role
As Boots operate in an outsourced IT environment it has a heavy reliance on its partners IBM and Xansa to provide project management expertise. In this instance Boots turned to Charteris Plc its programme management partner to provide a level impartiality to the overall programme and to de-risking the delivery of this complex, business critical, time bound, multi supplier and multi disciplined programme.
Charteris’ role was to provide end to end programme management for all the technology aspects of the divestment, from network services, payroll through to web hosting and e-mail.
From the outset the Charteris programme assimilated the commercial, political and business issues and drivers. Through the use of the Boots in house Prince based project management methodology and value-added Charteris techniques; the programme quickly took a manageable structure. The programme followed a waterfall delivery lifecycle from requirements gathering, high level design, solutioning and implementation.
The programme manager worked to build strong relationships with all parties involved and in particular with IBM, Boots and Reckitt Benckiser; this helped significantly in maintaining the confidence, focus and momentum throughout the programme.
Solution
At the point of the sale announcement, the Charteris programme manager had already defined and costed a day one solution and was ready to engage with the buyer in order to agree change controls to this base solution.
Through a series of workshops and meetings the Reckitt Benckiser day one requirements were gathered. These requirements were change controlled through to an amended high level design, from this a further costing was prepared and commercial agreements reached with Reckitt Benckiser.
The solution involved numerous changes to regulated manufacturing and ERP (SAP) systems, network, windows domain, Lotus Notes mail infrastructure and the deployment of an onsite Reckitt Benckiser managed mail infrastructure.
The Charteris programme manager also worked closely with the Boots legal department to manage through a number of necessary changes to the TSA agreement itself.
The programme worked to a rigid control framework with risks managed right up to the go live date (the 1st of February) and beyond. The solution was deployed on time, significantly under budget and to the highest degree of satisfaction to all parties involved.
Steve Brown, Programme Delivery Director said, "Charteris used their skill and process to deliver a challenging programme and greatly assisted a smooth transition to Reckitt Benckiser. Apart from the technical aspects I was particularly impressed with the way they managed the cultural differences across Boots, Reckitt Benckiser and our outsourcing partners..."