Co-op brings IT roles back under direct control

Supermarket brings outsourced IT jobs in-house

The Co-op is bringing 36 IT roles back in-house from TCS

The Co-operative has brought 36 IT roles back in-house following its acquisition last year of supermarket chain Somerfield.

The roles relate to helpdesk and store systems support, as the company opts to re-create jobs previously outsourced by Somerfield.

The decision does not affect existing plans by Co-op to reduce its overall headcount by 872 people following the acquisition.

Of the original 1,022 employees working at Somerfield’s Bristol headquarters, 613 have already left, with most of the remaining staff expected to leave by Christmas. The Co-operative began its plans to close the Somerfield headquarters over a year ago in order to deliver cost savings.

The grocery chain’s IT department will not be hit by those plans, however, director of information systems food retail Mark Hale told Computing.

“What happened within Somerfield was that the vast majority of IT functions were outsourced to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which left a fairly small retained team of about 18 people. We’ve decided to take a number of services back in-house and so we’ve created some new roles.

“We’ve actually created a number of roles and brought a number of those jobs back from TCS into Manchester.”

He explained that Somerfield used a “totally outsourced” approach to IT, whereas Co-op had been selectively outsourcing IT functions, depending on where it could see value in outsourcing.

“We decided that our model of selective outsourcing is the model we wanted to use moving forwards, rather than a total outsource,” said Hale.

“We reviewed the cost. Our cost model was, broadly speaking, the same as Somerfield if not slightly better, and we didn’t see any benefit of going down the total outsourcing model route.”

He added that the bulk of the 36 roles created will be in Manchester, with a number of field roles as well.

The support roles will be primarily focused around first, second and third line support. In addition, a number of technical roles have been created to support the enlarged supply chain and central trading systems, according to Hale, along with a several roles relating to programme management and commercial management.

The Co-op acquired Somerfield for £1.57bn last year.