Ascendent Technology

Compass Group

Compass Group is the market leader in providing contract catering and support services with 2009 revenues of over £13.4billion. In the UK & Ireland revenues are over £1.8 billion. They have over 7,000 client sites across numerous sectors and market places within the UK and Ireland employing over 66,000 people. Their range of quality food and support services provides clients with specialised expertise enabling them to focus on their core business while outsourcing their non-core activities.

The Challenge

Compass Group UK & Ireland was looking for an Enterprise Portal solution to support their 7000 sites within the UK. The required solution needed to:

• Be scalable
 
• Be robust
 
• Include integrated web content managemen
 
• Be standards based

Compass undertook proof of concepts (POCs) with a variety of vendors. All were provided with a specification and five days to complete the POC.

Aligning Technology with the Businesses Needs

Compass Group UK & Ireland selected IBM WebSphere Portal, the #1 leader in the marketplace because it delivered on all of their requirements. They also chose Atech, the UK’s #1   WebSphere Portal Business Partner, to help them deliver. Their first project involved the redevelopment of the Compass UK Intranet. WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management (WCM) were used to deliver a new look and feel and to improve content authoring capabilities.

Looking to the Future

The IBM Portal, Process and Web Content Management products are key components in Compass Group’s Architecture going forward. The plan is that Portal will be the User Interface for all new applications and will also be used to expose functionality from existing applications (e.g. SAP).