OCS and SCC

The situation

OCS is a global facilities management company. Over 130,000 colleagues work across 8,000 customer sites in the UK, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. That scale brings a particular IT challenge: how do you support a workforce that’s distributed, mobile, and whose primary job isn’t to be near an IT person?

OCS colleagues work in offices, hospitals, retail stores, manufacturing plants and data centres. They’re cleaners, engineers, catering staff and security personnel. They use IT as a tool for their actual work: clocking in, accessing rotas, reporting problems, checking inventory. When IT breaks, their work stops. When IT support is slow or inconsistent, workarounds emerge. Neither is acceptable at scale.

Justin Parsons, Group Technology Director, faced a fragmented IT environment. Different geographies managed their own IT support. Hardware procurement was inconsistent across regions. Service desk capacity didn’t match demand. The company was growing, but the IT support model hadn’t scaled with it. There was no consistent way for a facilities engineer in Manchester and one in Munich to get the same quality of support or the same tools.

What SCC did

SCC was brought in to standardise IT support across OCS’s global operations. The key insight wasn’t that the company needed better technology. It was that OCS needed a consistent support model that could scale without proportionally scaling headcount. Hardware procurement had to become centralised enough to gain use without becoming so rigid that local teams lost flexibility. The service desk needed to handle demand without leaving colleagues waiting.

SCC analysed OCS’s support requirements across all regions. They identified which problems were local (a UK facilities team has different needs than an Asia Pacific one) and which could be standardised (service desk workflows, hardware procurement processes, support tiers). From there, SCC designed and deployed a responsive IT support model that worked the same way everywhere while allowing for local variation where it mattered.

Hardware procurement was simplified. Instead of each region buying separately, OCS moved to a model where SCC managed global procurement, negotiated with suppliers and delivered to regions. That gave OCS the economies of scale they needed while still allowing regional IT teams to request what made sense for their market.

The service desk was scaled differently. Rather than adding staff in each region, SCC implemented a structure where overflow from one region could be handled by another. A spike in tickets in the UK could be managed by colleagues in a different time zone. Colleagues got faster response times without the company needing to hire proportionally more support staff.

What changed

Over 15,000 colleagues using IT daily were now supported by a consistent model. That consistency meant the facilities engineer in Manchester could trust that their service desk experience would be the same as the one in Dubai. Hardware came from the same supply chain, followed the same specifications and worked the same way. Training for IT support staff was standardised across regions.

The efficiency gain was significant. By centralising procurement, OCS reduced hardware costs. By restructuring service desk support to be available across time zones, they improved response times. By standardising support processes, they reduced the training burden on regional IT teams. The company could now scale facilities management globally without scaling IT support costs proportionally.

What the client learned

Justin Parsons highlighted the nature of the partnership: “The most impressive part of the partnership so far is, is that word actually: partnership. SCC provides a huge array of services but what’s impressed me is a willingness to want to understand the services that are really going to make a difference to us as OCS.” The learning wasn’t about technology. It was about what partnership means at scale. OCS learned that they needed a partner who would invest in understanding their business, facilities management, not IT, and then design IT support around that reality.