Xerox Global Services: Media Backgrounder

Xerox Global Services is one of three business groups within Xerox Europe, and is the closest of these groups to traditional consultancy, concentrating more on services than products or technologies per se. The other groups are the Production Systems Group (PSG) and Xerox Office Group (XOG).

Xerox is the global leader in document management, offering the widest array of products, services and solutions in the industry. The Xerox Global Services vision is to be the world’s leading innovator in the outsourcing of document activity, and in the transformation of organisations’ document-intensive business processes. Xerox Global Services works with its customers to deliver cost savings and efficiency, by managing and improving their document intensive business processes - everyday processes such as customer communications, billing, training, or records management.

Xerox Global Services was created at the beginning of 2004 via the merger of Xerox Business Services (XBS) and Business Innovation Services (formerly XISS). This enables Xerox to have one services business for Europe with a single, stronger value proposition for its customers. Xerox Global Services is also better able to meet the demands of large and complex deals, to defend Xerox from competitors, and to consolidate all the necessary resources and expertise required to succeed.

Xerox Global Services now operates in 17 European countries. It works closely with its fellow business groups, adapting new technology from Xerox Research Centre Europe (Xerox’s sole European R&D facility) for use ‘in the field’, and sourcing the most appropriate devices and functionality from the XOG and PSG business groups to suit the needs of its customers. Its heritage in documents has made it the market leader in document outsourcing. In addition, Xerox Global Services is one of the best suppliers at delivering against its service level agreements (SLAs) - a statement corroborated by analyst house IDC .

Using these attributes, Xerox Global Services intends to grow its client base in 2004, as well as contributing to the success of XOG and PSG by promoting sales through its outsourcing and consultancy projects. Xerox Global Services will continue to grow in numbers and expertise through the transfer of personnel from customer organisations in large outsourcing contracts.

Ultimately, Xerox Global Services’ “raison d’être” is to help organisations make their document processes more efficient and effective. Even today, many European companies still perceive documents as something made of paper and with four corners (established by the IDC study commissioned by Xerox Global Services in 2003, “Documents – The Life Blood of Your Business?”)

In reality, documents are hard or soft copies including faxes, e-mails, presentations, web pages, and even music or still/moving picture files. The study revealed that most organisations are unaware of the actual costs associated with these various types of documents - only 10 per cent of the 956 organisations interviewed could estimate how much they actually spent on documentation, yet 82 per cent state that documents are ‘crucial to the successful operation of their organisation’. With the average cost of documents to a company running at up to 15 per cent of its revenue, there is a significant market for Xerox Global Services to help organisations identify these costs and help manage and reduce them. As an example, Xerox Global Services can save a €100 million revenue organisation with a document spend of €2.1M over €420,000 in document costs alone. Xerox Global Services counts Lloyds TSB, Siemens, EDS, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Bouygues Telecom amongst its European customers.

Xerox Global Services delivers its services to customers via 180 sales personnel and 250 document consultants based in Europe, and employs approximately 4,000 people in total. All services can be delivered to customers on their own sites, but Xerox Global Services also has facilities around Europe where large projects can be completed away from the customer premises if preferred. Xerox Global Services is split into three lines of business: Document Outsourcing, Xerox Office Services (XOS), and Business Process Services (BPS).

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