Background

Search has worked with Siemens within metering and data collecting fields for over 15 years. Our relationship has developed over the years, evolving from a contingent recruitment supply arrangement into a more strategic partnership with full outsourcing solution provision.

Our relationship initially developed around the meter reading division of Siemens’ business. Search provided hundreds of staff in both traditional and fully outsourced supply mechanism. More recently our business relationship has moved into the smart meter installation sector. We have developed our service offering to meet the demands of this high growth sector. Paul Mumford, Associate Director, has worked with Siemens over the 15 years that we have had the account and has been instrumental in driving the process that has evolved from recruitment supplier to outsourcing provision.

Search has created a supply relationship that is currently unique to the Siemens account, referred to by both parties as a ‘hybrid’ model, that sits somewhere between a fully outsourced managed service and a traditional recruitment and training supply service.

Siemens has been a valued and important client to Search and sit as in Search’s top three clients for overall spend. It is envisaged that the current opportunity will exceed all previous years spend and will continue to grow towards the next two to three years.

The initial requirement

Search worked with Siemens to develop a resources strategy that would help mitigate some of the industry recognised issues that all energy providers are faced with as they work towards the installation of smart meters by 2020 across the UK. The main challenges are the shortage of qualified resources and high attrition levels due to high demand for resources from competitors. The aim was to develop a model that would deliver circa 350-400 engineers by the end of 2017. This journey is now complete and on target to achieve headcount growth required.

Search is responsible for all attraction, selection, training / upskilling, employment of engineers, people (HR) and payroll management. Siemens retains the technical day to day management of the engineers and works closely with the Search account team to ensure a seamless employment model that gives security and commitment to the workforce.

This specifically designed supply model has been in operation with Siemens now for almost five years and has recently entered an exciting growth stage designed to quickly increase the size of the workforce.

Working in true partnership with Siemens, we continuously improve the process and adapt the solution to ensure we achieve target delivery dates. In a highly competitive marketplace Search has developed strong candidate attraction plans, alongside a strategy for allowing training of potential candidates who have previous background in the industry, alongside mechanisms for

on-boarding part qualified and novice Engineers, bringing them up to industry Dual Fuel Standards.

We achieved very successful years within this account in 2017 and 2018 and are looking forward to the next stage of workforce management within Smart in 2019 and beyond.

Our Case Studies

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Siemens - Smart Metering