Steria has officially signed off on an extension of its largest contract to date at Cleveland Police Authority (CPA) – (see Steria could benefit from police cuts at Cleveland) that will see it commit to an additional £9m in savings, in addition to the £50m already committed over the next ten years. The extension sees Steria open of a new shared service centre in Stockton from where it will now handle the Force’s finance, HR, procurement, fleet, and facilities services - of course with the hope of eventually selling this capability to other police forces. Despite the challenges faced by the Police cutbacks we have yet to see another force turn to BPO. However if and when they do, Steria should be in a good position to benefit.
Steria is also taking on more business process re-engineering activities for CPA from 1 July. This includes centralising crime management units in each of the four Cleveland districts, and merging with the central control room. It will also ‘civilianise’ a newly combined risk and operational planning unit that will handle emergency and event planning, together with risk assessment and safety.
The remit of Steria’s work with Cleveland goes beyond non-core and back office, to include more strategic activities such as the control room, and support for the preparation of criminal case files. This is an interesting aspect to this partnership, since it allows Steria greater ability to transform the end to end business processes for the client, while also helping them to commit to greater savings (see Steria’s platform-based shared services strategy).