Local VAR Takes Business Back From Offshore Competitor

Find someone that speaks your business language. That's the lesson Welch's Foods Inc., Concord, Mass., learned when it switched management of its help desk from an Indian outsourcer to Waltham, Mass.-based NWN Corp. NWN's success at Welch's shows how local VARs can trump offshore outsourcers with the ability to muster local resources to quickly solve a problem.

Welch's, with about 1,200 employees and annual revenues of about $700 million, decided that instead of adding head count and infrastructure to support a transition to Oracle Corp.'s E-Business Suite, it would seek strategic outsourcing partners for services including the help desk. Welch's started out trying to integrate CA help desk products and an Indian outsourcing firm's SLAs.

"[But]their model was really designed for larger firms and we weren't quite large enough in head count in our IT staff to manage their best practices operating model the way it was designed," said Welch's former information services vice president Larry Rencken, who recently left the company.

In stepped NWN, which posted 2007 revenues of about $160 million and is the third-fastest-growing VAR in the country (No. 3 on the CRN 2007 Fast Growth 100). It had to move fast: Welch's had about five weeks to get a help desk ready prior to the implementation of the Oracle ERP upgrade. "We talked with them about how they manage their internal processes and they were quite successful," said Drew Phelps, NWN's command center director.

"They were in a real pinch and we were able to react quickly and get [everyone] on the same page from an expectation standpoint," added NWN CEO Mont Phelps.

NWN advised Welch's to implement full help desk support over a three-month period rather than rush to meet the tight deadline. NWN currently provides level one and level two help desk support for all end users on all applications ranging from shrink-wrapped software to proprietary applications and Oracle's ERP.

Said Rencken, "From day one, NWN aligned with our vision. They made commitments to what they were going to do and when they were going to do them."