Sainsbury's to contract out computing and wages

Sainsbury's, the supermarket group, yesterday said it planned to contract out its IT and payroll departments in a bid to increase efficiency.

Sainsbury's, the supermarket group, yesterday said it planned to contract out its IT and payroll departments in a bid to increase efficiency.

About 800 computer workers and 45 wages staff will be transferred to separate outsourcing companies.

But the supermarket group said that the staff would be employed on the same pay and conditions when they transferred to IT specialists Andersen Consulting and Rebus Human Resource.

It added that the 800 IT employees would go to Andersen in order to give Sainsbury's ageing computer system a major overhaul.

The contract will encompass designing, building, implementing and running of a new system operating across the supermarket chain.

Sainsbury's chief executive, Sir Peter Davis, said: "The age and complexity of our current IT systems are hampering our ability to perform and develop and our required rate of change is made even more crucial with our ambitions for e-commerce.

"We currently spend in excess of £200m a year on our supermarket IT systems and operations."

Sir Peter added: "It is essential that we get better value for money and through Andersen Consulting we have identified a customer-centric platform which gets us where we need to be and fast."

Discussions are being completed with Rebus Human Resource to outsource Sainsbury's payroll operation.