Celebrating 30 years of Entec Si

Over the last 30 years, the technology and business landscape has evolved dramatically, and we have continued to innovate and develop our offering to help organisations navigate an increasingly complex digital environment.

Amidst rapid change, vital pillars of business growth, such as people, remain constant. From our earliest digitalisation projects to today’s AI-driven landscape, putting people at the heart of change, both within our own team and the organisations we support, has remained fundamental to success.

As we celebrate our 30^th anniversary, we look back at three decades of technological evolution, some of the projects that have defined our journey, and the people focused lessons that remain just as important in today’s rapidly evolving digital world as they did when we first started out.

Entec Si was founded in Birmingham in 1996, offering organisations expert business change consultancy services across technology and digital transformation, with the aim of delivering change for good.

With the launch of The World Wide Web still fresh in business leaders’ minds, across 1996- 2006, software as a service (SaaS) was gaining significant traction and unleashing a new age of digital, business intelligence.

We offered expert guidance around how to utilise digital innovation to improve efficiency and provide return on investment. Organisations were often inexperienced and needed to avoid pitfalls as teams rapidly digitalised processes. For example, transitioning from traditional communications to email, and replacing paper-based, manual procedures and spreadsheets with computerised finance systems.

As new technology evolved, a significant element of the guidance organisations required was around supporting and upskilling team members to feel empowered and capable in the digital workplace.

In the late 1990s, Birmingham City Council faced a significant challenge. With around 60,000 employees, including approximately 25,000 teachers, HR and payroll processes were managed across 20 plus different departments using a mixture of systems, spreadsheets and inconsistent working practices.

Payroll processing relied heavily on manual data entry from multiple HR systems into a single payroll platform, creating a labour-intensive manual process that was vulnerable to errors and inefficiencies.

We were brought in to help design and deliver more effective processes and integrate HR and payroll into one existing tech solution called Vidipay. Working in a dual role, the team provided both technical architecture expertise and business analysis support.

The team worked closely with stakeholders to map end-to-end business processes, identify inconsistencies across departments, and develop more standardised ways of working throughout the employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding through to absence management, payroll, and employee exit processes. They then provided the technical management to source, build, configure and launch the reconfigured integrated solution.

The scale and complexity of the programme were considerable, involving thousands of users and a wide range of employment terms, contracts and working arrangements. By combining technical expertise with a deep understanding of business processes, we helped the council streamline operations, reduce manual intervention and create a more consistent and efficient HR and payroll function.

As digital transformation progressed through the new millennium, the pace of technological evolution accelerated rapidly, spiking demand for our services to help deliver long lasting transformation.

The debut of Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to the roll out of cloud computing across organisations. Increasingly, teams moved to cloud-based contact centres to manage customer communications online, rather than on a physical IT system.

For example, we orchestrated a two-phased rollout of a cloud-based contact centre for SG Fleet, an international fleet management company. Our expert team implemented a new, integrated cloud system and company-wide IT improvements to upgrade existing functions.

Integrated IT was becoming increasingly fundamental to organisations, and teams were developing digital and self-service options for customers, who expected digital access, and the workforce, who required more flexible, technology-enabled options.

In this time, we continued to grow and partner with new clients. Our team bridged the gap between technical teams and business needs, ensuring seamless execution, strategic alignment, and long-lasting impact.

We helped reinvent the library services for the 21st Century, shaping and delivering a very successful Transformation & ICT Programme which helped Library of Birmingham respond to change through a more sustainable, commercially focused operating model. It opened on time and under budget on 3rd September 2013, to great public acclaim.

We created a programme team combining client staff with our project management and IT specialists, bringing together technical expertise with library and archive knowledge. This enabled us to integrate thoroughly with the service and ensure that we could fully capture all requirements and define solutions.

The transformation ensured customers receive a wider range of services, delivered in a more consistent way by dedicated customer experience staff, self-service channels and innovative digital content solutions.

Throughout the project, we empowered staff to work in a more agile, flexible manner, using streamlined policies and procedures.

Find out more about the Library of Birmingham project.

Established across a range of industry sectors, we continued to grow our team and gain vast experience leading service transformation, ICT projects and programmes in the last decade. We also assist with people strategy, putting the workforce at the heart of transformations.

As technology continues to evolve and organisations race to implement the latest systems, those that leverage a people-focused approach as their competitive advantage will see the most tangible returns.

Across recent months and years, the AI and robotics revolution has rapidly gained pace. With new technologies constantly being developed and advancing, we help organisations cut through the complexity, identify where technology can deliver genuine value and implement solutions that support wider business objectives.

We project managed the implementation of a high profile, lifesaving surgical robot at the Alexandra Hospital for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust to open the door for elective urological surgery for men with prostate cancer.

We took responsibility for coordinating the build works, recruitment and training, finances, clinical operations and communication efforts, as well as the digital elements needed to support the installation of the robot. Operations began using the da Vinci Xi surgical robot by the end of 2022.

Successfully delivering change for good meant utilising a blended team approach, which further ensured a holistic overview of the entire change programme and kept each element running smoothly.

More about our work with the surgical robot.

Entec Si is entering its next chapter from a position of strength, and as we continue to grow our team, project pipeline and customer base, our focus remains firmly on building on the last three decades and delivering change for good.

30 years of enabling effective change through people, processes, technology and digital transformation has shown us that while technology will continue to evolve, the fundamentals of successful transformation will not.

The goal has never been to predict what technology comes next, but to understand where it can add real value and implement it effectively, with people at the heart of the journey. Find out more about how we make change happen and deliver lasting business transformation here.

Want to see how we delivered lasting change on previous projects? Check out our work here.