blue light viability

Airwave blue light viability

Undermasthead Shape
Airwave Solutions provide world-class mission-critical communication services used by the emergency services in the toughest situations.

Airwave approached Clear Solutions to assess and analyse the long-term viability of their business model within a volatile competitor landscape and the risk of the Home Office choosing a telecom communications network rather than the Airwave radio network at the end of the existing “blue light” contract.

Objectives

  • Business analysis
  • Bid advice
  • Strategic consultancy
  • Procurement insight

Clear Solutions undertook business continuity analysis and contingency planning in order to build an options paper and supporting business case for the Chief Operating Officer and executive board. The remit was to determine the long-term viability of the core business model, cross referenced against the potential risk of exiting several core contracts of up to £1bn.

The difficulty was that the telecom operators could compete with existing infrastructure and offer much lower price than the bespoke Airwave radio network. The way for Airwave to really stand out was to emphasise the greater quality of the radio network and the greater levels of security as a separate network run for that sole purpose. Plus the several years of case study history in providing a highly reliable communications network.

The project included collating and assessing a complex range of diverse and disparate data from various sources including supply chain management, finance, legal, delivery, project management office, technical architecture, service management and human resources. This resulted in a detailed board level executive summary and risk / opportunity options analysis. This involved tact and empathy to extract the best of the data, as part of the difficulty was getting the different departments to talk the same language.

  • Services
  • - Competitor analysis
  • - SWOT analysis
  • - Technical roadmap
  • - Opportunity pipeline
  • - Risk and opportunity assessment
  • - Business continuity assessment

Achievements

Clear consolidated complex information regarding the existing business model, delivery status and bid pipeline to analyse and prepare a set of coherent recommendations to the board regarding business continuity within potential exit of several core contracts, providing recommendations to achieve a stable platform and thereby giving Airwave back control of their future bid strategy and sales processes.