“Ordina is making a stand. We believe that our place is right among our clients, where we are best placed to offer them solutions that can help them, tomorrow and in the more distant future. We want to operate in markets that help to shape the welfare of society as a whole: the public sector and the financial industry. These are markets in which we intend to achieve above-average growth.”

Ronald Kasteel Ordina’s CEO, is enthusiastic about the strategic choices the company has made.

What exactly does Ordina do?

“We supply clients in the Netherlands and Belgium with ground-breaking Consultancy, IT and Outsourcing solutions. We advise them on how to improve their business processes, we design and manage applications that support these improvements, and we take charge of entire business processes, including the IT aspects. We are strong in both the financial market and the public sector, but also have a big share of the industrial market. The themes that concern us are those that are going to play a vital role in the world of tomorrow – like customer service and business and management issues. We get together with decision-makers to discuss how they should best manage their operations and how they should position themselves in the market. We make sure not just that our solutions stand up to close scrutiny, but also that they work perfectly in practice.”

It still all sounds fairly abstract. Can you be a bit more explicit?

“Where customer service is concerned, it’s all about the way private firms and government organisations communicate with customers and the general public, and how they offer their products and services. In this respect, the Internet is rapidly evolving into a major distribution and service channel. Let me give you another example: take a call-centre run by an insurance company, where operators handle insurance claims on the phone. An operator can process an entire claim from start to finish in just one telephone call, thanks to the fact that he or she has access to a full digital customer file. Behind the telephone number lies a mass of interconnected processes and systems. Our great advantage is that we know how these work. Another example: organisational control in the public sector could mean adopting a new, smarter system of business inspections. The situation today is that businesses often receive visits from a vast array of inspectors, each of whom has to decide whether the firm in question is observing the rules and regulations that apply to his or her specialist field. We are currently working on a new system of inspections that would involve closer cooperation between the various inspectorates. Not only would this make life easier for the firms receiving the inspections – by reducing the amount of bureaucracy – it would also reduce the cost for the government. This type of improvement can have a huge impact.”

What does the future hold for Ordina?

“We provide three core services: Consulting, IT and Outsourcing. IT is still the powerhouse that drives our business. It gives us the tools we need to deliver on our promises. Customer service is one of our focal areas: for example, we will be assisting the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service to completely overhaul their processes. This should vastly improve the quality of the asylum procedure, which has been subject of public criticism. We helped to design the new processes and the IT infrastructure that is needed to handle them. It’s going to be a tremendous project that will have a huge impact on society as a whole. Without the aid of IT tools, it would simply not be possible to improve the asylum procedure in this way. In other words, IT is and will remain one of the key tools for realising progress for our clients.”

“The growth in the volume of our core IT business will be relatively less marked in the coming years, because we’ll be offshoring lots of extra design capacity. We want to expand our Consulting and Outsourcing services more rapidly, as these are areas in which we can really team up with our clients.”

Which markets offer the best growth opportunities?

“We expect to see a great deal of growth in Application Outsourcing and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), particularly in business-critical applications. The contract we recently signed with Rabobank is a good example of how application outsourcing works. Under the terms of the contract, Rabobank has given us the job of managing a large number of applications for a period of seven years. That’s not the only point of interest about the contract: it also involves the transfer of 150 Rabobank staff to our own workforce. Rabobank recognised our great experience in dealing with mergers, and knows that we keep a firm eye on the human dimension. What I mean is that, if we acquire a company in order to tap into its human and knowledge capital, we also make sure that the staff we acquire as a result, feel at home with us. This is one of the reasons why they chose us as their partner. The great thing about the Rabobank contract is that it has consolidatet our position in the finance sector. It’s an achievement we’re very proud of.”

What’s the difference between Application Outsourcing and BPO?

“BPO takes the whole thing a step further. With BPO, you take over an entire business process, including the people and the systems. This might be a bank’s entire back office, for example, handling payments, savings accounts, loans and security transactions. It could also involve running a mortgage department or an in-house securities investment system. Our job is to ensure that the whole process runs smoothly. In other words, we run business-critical systems. Our BPO division has designed a standard environment to which we can hook up any player in the financial market. It complies with all the stringent rules and regulations laid down by the Dutch Central Bank and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). Our customers no longer need constantly to adapt their software and business processes to changes in legislation – which is a big problem in the financial world, where the new laws come thick and fast. This is a job for which we take responsibility, thus enabling our customers to devote their energy to developing new products and raising the standard of customer service. That’s another field in which we’ve got a lot to offer.”

Why did Ordina decide to concentrate on the Benelux market?

“We employ over 5,702 people on long-term projects for major clients in the Benelux countries. The figures suggest that our markets offer plenty of growth potential for the future. Last year was another excellent year for us, with a 44% rise in operating profit and 27% revenue growth.

Here in the Netherlands and Belgium, we’re physically close to our clients. We speak their language, we know their markets and we know how they work. These are all vital points for a company that wants to be involved in complex processes of change and renewal. This is a benefit that our clients recognise, too. It’s also one of the reasons why they’re keen to work with us. Thanks to our prominent position as an established supplier to leading industrial and commercial companies, as well as to organisations in the public sector, we can offer outstanding career opportunities to consultants and IT professionals. We can offer them a chance to get in on the action at the coalface.”

Ordina is keen to be the market leader in its specialist markets. How do you intend to set about this?

“We are planning to improve our market communications by making three things even clearer to our clients: what we stand for, the choices we have made and the areas in which we excel. We believe that, given our size, we can be successful only if we make choices and position ourselves as a specialist player. The market is changing, and consultants are being given increasingly complex jobs to perform. Clients are entrusting more and more responsibility to their knowledge suppliers. They do this in the confidence that the latter are fully familiar with their own specialist fields and their clients’ businesses. For our own part, it means that we need to be proactive and to be constantly at the forefront of developments. It means working permanently on our own professionalism. We can do this only if we manage to attract and retain lots of talented staff, people who are committed to Ordina and want to work for a winner and to be winners themselves. We believe that Ordina can become the market leader by employing the most talented people in the business, and of course by working for the best clients in the business.”

Next chapter: IT as the driver of innovation in public services