Broadband Britain Success Story: Oxford Actuaries and Consultants

Financial services consultancy Oxford Actuaries and Consultants (OAC) is saving £1 million per year by allowing staff to telework from their homes.

The company was set up in 1994 and has 30 staff but no traditional office. Employees work remotely using an internet-based virtual private network (VPN) to link to central applications including Lotus Notes, imaging and document management systems.

The system saves on overheads and provides competitive advantage says OAC general manager Bernard Grenville-Jones. He said 1m was being saved from a turnover of £3m.

'Those kind of savings mean we can decrease our charge-out rates, which enables us to become more competitive.

'The ability for a services company to telework productively, supported by broadband, means the business machine becomes much less fat and much more muscle,' said Grenville-Jones.

Broadband is allowing the concept of teleworking to evolve so it is no longer seen as different to working in an office.

'It's about equipping staff with a solution that means they are in the office, even though geographically they are at home,' said Grenville-Jones.

As well as savings on traditional overheads such as building rental and facilities, teleworking institutes a different culture with lower management costs.

'We don't have to pay staff premium salaries for management expertise because in a teleworking business a lot of the day-to-day work of managers can be written into the systems staff use.

'People are not face to face and in that scenario the need to be managed diminished because there is none of the politicking that creates problems in the traditional office,' said Grenville-Jones.

OAC's VPN carries 10 gigabytes of data traffic every month.