The five-year partnership will see digital transformation, consulting and business re-engineering services firm Tech Mahindra implement Communisis’ digital transformation strategy “through legacy modernisation, enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, service desk operations, cloud and vendor management”.
The partnership, which has already kicked off - with Tech Mahindra currently in knowledge gathering mode - will also enable and transform Leeds-headquartered Communisis’ Enterprise back-office operations, including the Finance Function.
“Tech Mahindra’s Next Generation suite will modernise and impact key CXO objectives whilst aligning the business transformation with the ERP journey,” the business stated.
“With this capability, Communisis will accelerate its internal digital transformation programme while assisting clients in their own transition towards a largely digital communication landscape.”
Communisis said the programme will also transform its client facing capabilities, while ensuring the integrity of the back-office functions, and added clients will be able to easily access the company’s full range of products and services, “from secure print right through to display advertising, and everything in between”.
Communisis CEO Phil Hoggarth said the partnership with Tech Mahindra would “bring pace” to the company’s cloud adoption, the rollout of its omnichannel service capabilities, and in helping clients make the transition from paper to digital.
He told Printweek: “This is part of our major transformation programme for Communisis as a whole as we get ourselves ready to make sure that we’re futureproofing the business and so that we can be around for another 100-plus years in quite a changing marketplace.
“It’s been changing for a long time, but this has been enhanced, heightened and accelerated somewhat by the pandemic process, and consumers’ habits around their willingness to accept other forms of communications than print. So this transformation has come about as something of a speeding up of a reaction to some of those things, and making sure that we’re going to be a relevant organisation for the future for our customers.
“Tech Mahindra are building a new state-of-the-art platform that brings a number of our other partnerships – HP, Ricoh, Quadient – all together on a single cloud-first platform.
“It just allows us to become much more agile as an organisation, to integrate with our clients better, integrate in the future with new leading technologies that come out, and be able to plug and unplug those in a much quicker and safer way for our customers. It also allows us to be able to react a lot quicker to the changing market dynamics as things progress.”
Communisis recently invested £14m in six new HP PageWide presses to maintain its high service levels and flexibility, and Hoggarth stressed that print remains a key part of the company’s future.
“While we will always have print at our hearts for that side of the business, what we use that print for moving forward I think will move as the market trends change.
“We’ve always been very heavily focused in the financial services sector, and this allows us to diversify our offering into new markets and places.”
He added: “How print is used and the value that’s being derived from it as part of a broader communications eco-system is changing. I think it’s still seen as a commodity by a lot of businesses, and what our new eco-system will do is be able to switch that with a lot of our customers and consult with them around how they get more value out of the communications that they send to their customers.”
Tech Mahindra senior VP and head of sales for UK and Ireland Jinender Jain commented: “Digital transformation in customer communication is a crucial aspect of brand experience, and it should be at the forefront of every organisation’s business strategy.
“We are looking forward to partnering with Communisis in the journey towards more customer-centric processes, seamless experiences, data-driven operations to achieve its business goals.”
