News

The Signature UK team has scored another Most Innovative Supplier of the Year Award

The annual Vitality Supplier Awards is a prestigious event hosted to recognize exceptional suppliers and celebrate the contribution they make to the Group’s success.

The Awards ceremony took place on 15 March 2022 at the prestigious Soho Hotel in London, and marks a huge change to the way that UK companies get back to normal work functions.
The Annual awards recognised the best of the best from 1200 suppliers and totaling 77 nominations, we are proud that our top prize came as a result of a unanimous panel vote!

We received the award for the integral way in which we provide innovative solutions to Vitality UK across all their business units. Flourishing under immense pressure and tight deadlines, the SBS UK team of less than a handful and being the only supplier able to, delivered the Making Tax Digital project within six months to digitalize the Vitality Group’s VAT return submissions, a compulsory regulatory requirement with penalty-carrying deadlines. The team innovatively found a simple solution to a very complex problem by standardizing the way accounting journals are posted across the business upstream to facilitate downstream integration including 11 different tax treatments for 6 companies (and as many teams) for over 150,000 unique tax code assignments in the same period from 2.8 million transactions processed.

This solution was exceptional as it utilized only internal sources and existing iCompare software with clever configurations and process design to provide reporting outputs conforming to regulatory and user requirements. By using a defined future-proof onboarding methodology and predefined business rules, it is a resource light solution with low maintenance requirements. This solution, as well as numerous other financial and operational control framework projects are supported by the team in a replicable fashion to ensure business value creation outweighs work effort with instant turnaround times and innovative problem solving bridging the gap between business and technology.

What does the UK team do for Vitality?

The SBS UK service offering includes the end-to-end control environment framework using the iCompare software suite from source via data transformation (integrating with 20+ core systems), allocations, various levels of reconciliations, accounting maps, -postings and reporting; processing over 2 billion transactions p.a. across all Vitality business units. The value the SBS team adds is not only in the numbers, but their understanding of the business and associated processes as a whole, being responsible for implementation from start to end including requirements, design and post-implementation changes and support on site or part of Vitality teams with minimal turnaround times.

Solutions are approached very similarly to the Vitality shared value model by leveraging off synergies created between business units and focusing on innovate future-proof solutions and reporting the results in the form of real-time dashboards or other MI often used as is by Exco (300+ reports are distributed to over 500 users). The service is provided by a small agile team of highly skilled and experienced individuals always going above and beyond. This often means services are provided without prompt as extension of scope requirements by providing additional input in processes or value-added outcomes based on an understanding of the whole Vitality ecosystem.

Congratulations to Charl, Bradley, Chris, Maniska, Mia, Tyrone and Janita for their hard work and dedication.