Vodafone 2013 Annual Report Download - page 35

We are taking a number of steps across the
Group to improve our cost efciency and
simplify our processes:
Cost efciency
Over 69% of the new radio sites deployed
across the Group during the year were shared
with other mobile operators, which reduces
the cost of renting or building new sites and
reduces the environmental impact.
During the nancial year we commenced
a UK network sharing agreement with O2 and
we are targeting 18,500 sites to be shared
by 2015. In Ireland, we have entered into
a site sharing agreement with Three Ireland,
targeting 2,000 shared sites by 2015.
With a clear focus on driving greater
standardisation and simplication, we are
optimising the supplier base across our
operations. In India for example, following
supplier segmentation exercises and a rigorous
drive to improve operational efciencies,
we rationalised our supplier base by about
75% over the last two years.
Unifying network management
During the year we reduced the number
of network engineering teams in Europe
from 13 individual country teams to four
consolidated teams. We also consolidated our
network operations centres, which provide
service level monitoring in Europe, to two from
13. In India, the 12 separate regional network
operations centres have been consolidated
into one single centre in Pune.
Unifying IT management
We are progressing well in decommissioning,
with over 100 legacy IT applications during
the 2013 nancial year. In addition, common
customer operations processes are being
progressively deployed throughout the Group,
which are supported by a single set of tightly
integrated IT applications. These actions are
expected to both reduce costs and improve
the time to market for new offers such as
mobile commerce services.
We have developed one integrated data centre
cloud across Europe and Africa and are well
underway to extending it to Asia this year
which enables us to operate highly resilient
services and to be faster to market with our
new services.
Centralising and standardising
functions and processes
Our central purchasing function, the Vodafone
Procurement Company (the ‘VPC’)
in Luxembourg, consolidates spend across
our global operations allowing us to leverage
scale, and achieve better prices and terms
and conditions. During the nancial year the
spend managed through the VPC increased
to €6.9 billion up from €5.3 billion in the 2012
nancial year.
In addition we continue to centralise
procurement of software and licences, which
is anticipated to generate around £100 million
of cost benets over the next three years.
Shared service centres of expertise
We use shared service centres in Hungary,
India and Egypt to provide nancial,
administrative, IT, customer operations
andhuman resource services for our
operations in over 30 countries which
helps us to standardise and optimise the
way we runour businesses. The number of
sharedcentre employees has increased from
6,000 in 2012 by nearly 30% to over 7,800 by
31 March 2013, and we are targeting around
10,500 by March 2014.
>7,800
of our employees are now in four low
cost, high skill locations, to provide
shared services for the Group.
M2M solutions for energy savings
Applying our M2M solutions to monitor energy at our
network sites, ofces, retail premises and data centres
has allowed us to optimise energy consumption,
procure competitively and reduce our carbon
footprint. This has delivered savings over the last
twoyears of about 25% across 11 European markets
winning us recognition at the European Supply Chain
Excellence Awards 2012.
Modernising the UK business
In the UK we are introducing a simplied organisation and enhancing our IT systems
in order to improve our customers’ experience of interacting with Vodafone. This will,
for example, enablethe UK business to reduce the number of different price plans
from 5,000tojust 500. Additionally we will be able to better integrate the various
routes our customers use to interact with us – retail shops, online, call centres and
mobile devices – to make it easier for customers to order online and pick up in store.
33 Vodafone Group Plc
Annual Report 2013
Overview Business
review Performance Governance Financials Additional
information