ERP Service Compliance (SAP)
Case Study: Achieving $26M in IT Infrastructure Savings through Service Compliance and Proactive Management
Client Overview:
Our client, a leading player in the industrial sector, was focused on protecting their globally competitive edge through continuous improvement and productivity-enhancing initiatives.
Operating on a massive scale, even minor operational efficiencies could translate into multi-million dollar savings. With this in mind, the global CIO sought to build and maintain a culture of service compliance within IT operations to drive tangible business outcomes.
Challenges:
- High IT Infrastructure Costs: The client was facing significant operational expenses (opex) related to their IT infrastructure, which needed to be optimised without compromising performance.
- Siloed IT Operations: Internal IT teams were working in silos, leading to inefficiencies and a reliance on users to detect and report failures.
- Inconsistent SAP Transaction Times: The client’s global SAP environment suffered from inconsistent transaction times, with processes taking up to 1.5 minutes, causing frustration among users and straining relationships with service providers.
- Strained Service Provider Relationships: There was a lack of clarity and accountability between internal teams, service providers, and SaaS providers, resulting in operational friction and degraded service quality.
Solution:
The client partnered with Ikara to implement a Service Compliance platform that would address these challenges by focusing on several key areas:
- IT Infrastructure Cost Reduction:
- By benchmarking service compliance KPIs and aligning them with an infrastructure capacity management approach, the client was able to consolidate their IT infrastructure, resulting in $26M USD in savings (a 30% reduction in opex).
- Improving SAP Transaction Times:
- Ikara’s SAP service compliance baselines reduced user transaction times from 1 minute 30 seconds to a consistent 15 seconds globally. This uplift in performance transformed organizational efficiency and significantly enhanced the reputation of the IT team.
- Aligning Global Supply Contracts:
- The client aligned their global supply contracts with service partners to support back-to-back service compliance objectives. Their Global WAN provider acknowledged the application experience objectives as service warranties, ensuring that both the customer and service provider were aligned through the Ikara platform.
- Eliminating IT Silos:
- By establishing a known good state of service compliance within the Ikara platform, the client removed internal IT silos and reduced reliance on users to detect and report failures. This proactive approach improved operational efficiency and fostered a culture of accountability.
- Re-architecting Infrastructure with Confidence:
- With consistent service baselines in place, the client re-architected their infrastructure to reduce costs while sustaining optimal SAP transaction times. As part of their migration from an on-premises to a cloud instance of SAP in Microsoft Azure, Ikara’s service compliance baselines provided the foundation for ongoing KPI management.
- Enhancing Capacity Planning and Service Assurance:
- The client utilised Ikara’s historical data for capacity planning, enabling reliability engineers to set baseline values for service elements and receive specific alerts when values fell outside compliance ranges. This condition-based monitoring approach simplified data measurement and process reliability, contributing to broader organisational goals such as reduced Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and minimised energy usage.
- IT Infrastructure Cost Reduction:
Results:
The implementation of Ikara’s Service Compliance platform resulted in a substantial $26M USD savings in IT infrastructure costs, a 30% reduction in opex. The client achieved significant improvements in SAP transaction times, reducing them from 1.5 minutes to 15 seconds globally. This transformation not only optimised the IT infrastructure but also strengthened relationships with service providers by establishing clear, accountable service standards.
Conclusion:
Ikara’s collaboration with this industrial sector leader enabled the client to achieve a high-performance operational environment while significantly reducing costs. By embedding a culture of service compliance, the client not only met but exceeded their service assurance and capacity planning objectives. This case study exemplifies how a strategic approach to service compliance can drive both cost savings and operational excellence in large-scale IT environments.