Utility company realises savings and is energised for growth
By working directly in an integrated team with the utility company, SoftwareOne developed a strong rapport with stakeholders in the company and a hands-on understanding of the business. The team’s agility helped it realise USD 2M in the first year from easy wins, decommissioning unnecessary apps.
Those savings came primarily from software maintenance and licensing, though there were other, harder to quantify savings as well. This could include infrastructure savings from shutting down a server made redundant when the application running on it was decommissioned.
The optimisation didn’t just occur with internal systems. SoftwareOne also helped identify customer-facing applications that could be spun down. These included customer billing and credit, customer contract management, project support services and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, among others. Many of these represent multi-year decommissioning efforts that rank high in difficulty. The goal was not to simply cut applications, but to consolidate and integrate applications so customers had a faster, better experience.
The utility achieved its goal of a rationalised application portfolio that it could incorporate in an EA practice to help drive better decisions in the process. It eliminated waste, cutting unneeded applications it previously had, representing savings of more than 17%. The company also benefited from the knowledge transfer that came from working closely with the SoftwareOne team integrated over the years of the project. The implementation of ServiceNow APM and APM Processes will help ensure the company maintains application portfolio best practices to go forward efficiently.
