IT Transformation for an industrial gas company
Bails Constant · RECERCAT (Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya) · 2015
This document describes the objectives an results of a 6-month project aiming at designing an IT transformation plan for a leading industrial gas company. In a hard context of post 2008-crisi, the objectives of the transformation were quite ambitious: Generate 20% savings on the considered scope, reinforce the security of the systems while keeping the current flexibility and reactivity. After a first detailed assessment of the scope baseline, the project team identified a series of levers to be implemented in order to generate the target savings. On the end-user services costs, which corresponds to the dedicated scope covered by this report, levers as diverse as rationalizing the number of devices allocated to the employees, improving the efficiency of the call-centers, outsourcing the digital workplace to contract it “as a Service” or standardizing the catalog of available devices to adapt them to the needs of each specific job have generated 7.5 millions € (M€) savings out of the 37M€ baseline collected for 2014. Those levers have been prioritized and timed out to ensure the best ROI possible, starting by the “quick wins” and finishing by the heavy investments, which were financed by the savings of the first deployed levers. The final payback was estimated to be of 1.5 years. At the project level, organization and staffing for the project were also defined, with a peak of 61 FTE needed at the peak of the transformation. Different committees were created, from the board level to ensure the respect of general directives to the weekly review meetings to follow the pace of the implementation and to solve operational issues. IT transformation projects are getting more and more frequently at the agenda of the biggest companies’ CEOs as it enables to generate important savings with a quick payback. Long put aside and considered as the playfield of the CIO only, it should now become critical for top management to launch this kind of initiatives on a regular basis to ensure the leanest cost structure possible.