The client
Compass Group is one of the world’s largest food services companies. In the UK & Ireland business, the data warehouse underpins reporting across thousands of sites — the kind of system nobody notices until it stops.
The arrangement
EBI served as Compass UK & Ireland’s third-line support partner for the data warehouse: senior data engineers on demand, augmenting the in-house team, picking up the issues that need deep expertise — without Compass having to fund and retain that specialism as internal headcount.
Why it kept being renewed
Support contracts get renewed when the phone gets answered and the problem gets fixed. Compass’s own reference says it plainly: happy with the service, happy with the response times, renewed year after year — with engagements on file spanning more than a decade.
That’s the quiet economics of managed support done well: a fraction of the cost of a full-time specialist, none of the key-person risk, and the accumulated system knowledge that makes the next fix faster than the last.
Why it matters if you’re reading this
Every bespoke system EBI builds comes with the option of exactly this arrangement behind it — the same team that built it, on call, for years. Compass is what that looks like over a decade of renewals.