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At a Glance
Company Profile
The company is a privately-held U.S.-based multi-billion dollar consumer services company that embodies multiple consumer-facing brands.
Services Featured
- Change Management
- EquaSiis Workbench software
- Negotiation and Contracting
- Outsourcing
- Selection
- Sourcing Governance
- Transformation
- Transition
Business Processes Involved
- Information Technology (IT)
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Company Leverages Industry Best Practices to Reduce Costs by 20%
Executive Summary
A large U.S.-based company was looking to consolidate its IT application and maintenance functions, standardize processes across IT and overall improve its service and reduce IT costs. The company engaged EquaTerra to help it evaluate outsourcing as an option for accomplishing these objectives. EquaTerra helped the organization identify, screen and transition its IT processes to an outsourcing partner. With EquaTerra’s assistance throughout the entire transition, the company successfully transferred its IT infrastructure and software application and maintenance operations to a third-party outsourcing provider. As a result, the company is on track to reduce its costs by 20 percent and gain access to industry best practices.
The Business Challenge
Each of the brands under the company’s family of products was technologically operating independently of one another. While the company had undergone an IT infrastructure consolidation a few years ago, each of the brands still maintained its own CIO and application development and maintenance processes.
The company knew that, by further consolidating its IT efforts, they could increase its efficiencies and achieve greater cost savings. They also knew that a qualified outsourcing services provider would offer them access to industry best practices, improved technology capabilities and improved marketing intelligence potential.
Teri Robinson, the Managing Director at EquaTerra who worked closely on this project, says that company officials said they believed technology consolidation was the key ingredient to their future. "The company needed a transformation of its IT organization in order to accomplish its goals of having its IT services aligned across all brands," she said. "Outsourcing helped bring disparate IT organizations together so it could, in the end, drive consistencies and processes across the board."
The company engaged EquaTerra to help it do this.
How We Helped
"We were engaged to help the company select and transition to an outsourcing service provider," says Robinson. "We helped the company develop an RFP, identify and evaluate providers, conduct due diligence and manage final contact negotiations with the chosen outsourcing partner."
Robinson also says EquaTerra was further engaged to help the company transition to the new IT organization and was tasked with putting a variety of governance processes in place. The company further employed EquaTerra’s EquaSiis Enterprise Tool (http://equasiis.com/software-plus-intelligence/equasiis-enterprise), which enables the company and provider organizations to easily collaborate with one another.
"EquaSiis Enterprise was important in helping the company – and each of its brands – communicate with the service provider in that it provided a single repository for all information related to the outsourced work," says Robinson.
Results
The company experienced the following successes as a result of hiring an outsourcing partner:
First, the company is on track to standardize its IT processes and technologies across each brand, which will enable them to reduce costs by a significant 20 percent.
Second, the chosen outsourcing service provider enabled the company to begin leveraging industry best practices and technologies. The provider offers a variety of tools, including a telecom expense management system, which is expected to save the company additional money each year.
Third, the company found that using a service provider enabled it to operate in a more cohesive manner. The brands are able to leverage the same technologies where it makes sense and can share intelligence more easily.
Overall, company officials say they are very happy with how the project turned out. The CIO of the company told Robinson that working with EquaTerra was the "best consulting money we ever spent in any area of this organization."
Advisor Insights
For other companies embarking on an IT outsourcing journey, here are a few tips from EquaTerra’s Robinson:
Transforming an organization without a service provider can be a long, arduous and costly process.
Robinson says that many companies try to consolidate their IT in-house because they think it will save them time and money. While this tactic is effective for some companies, a larger and more complex organization often requires help.
"In this company’s case, outsourcing helped it significantly reduce costs and increase efficiencies across the brands," she says. "Working with a service provider made it possible to do this much more quickly and efficiently."
Just because you have a provider partner doesn’t mean you can just turn the keys over to them.
Robinson says any company going through a transformation should be whole-heartedly involved in the process.
"Companies should work closely with the provider organization to help them truly understand and share their vision for what they want their newly transformed organization to look like," says Robinson. "Even though they [service providers] are experts at what they do, they are not experts at your business. Company officials need to be active members in making the organization better – that is the true key to success."
About EquaTerra
EquaTerra sourcing advisors help clients achieve sustainable value in their IT and business processes. Our advisors average more than 20 years of industry experience and have supported more than 2,000 transformation and outsourcing projects across more than 60 countries. Supporting clients throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, we have deep functional knowledge in Finance and Accounting, HR, IT, Procurement and other critical business processes. EquaTerra helps clients achieve significant cost savings and process improvement with internal transformation, shared services and outsourcing solutions.
