Improved Planning and Tracking Tools Help Large Utility Better Manage Costs & Operation of Contracted IT Services
The Client
Large utility company that engages in the natural gas and electric businesses, including generating, transmitting, distributing and selling electricity; transporting, processing, storing and marketing natural gas; and operating power plants.
What the Client Wanted
- Better process to monitor the operation and manage the costs of using contracted (outsourced) IT services across all business units
- Shorten the time it takes to make decisions on purchasing and allocating IT contractor services
- More efficient process in the Accounts Payable Department for reconciling hours worked with contractor invoices
Challenges
- Client had six major service vendors supporting its IT organization, each segmented to support various business areas
- Each business unit had its own unique needs that had to be factored into the decision-making process
LÛCRUM’s Solution
- Created a new program within the existing data warehouse that automatically gathers the necessary data such as “Committed,” “Approved,” “Actual” and “Forecasted” spending from sources throughout the enterprise, cleanses the data, merges the data and makes it available to users throughout the company
- New process includes an automated system that tracks:
- IT needs of each business unit
- Budgets versus money spent
- Results achieved and ROI on the cost of services versus the benefits received
- Contractor time involved by department and reconciles that time with bills received so that timely payment can be issued
- Supports decision-making on the assignment of the appropriate outside IT resources to help each department
- Created user-friendly “canned” reporting tools as well as tools that people can use to create their own customized “slice-n-dice” reports
LÛCRUM’s Approach
- Conducted initial in-depth meetings with all departments in order to understand each unit’s needs so that the appropriate technology solution could be developed and deployed
- Used existing processes, hardware and tools
- Following application development, helped train users throughout the organization on how to utilize the new planning and management tools
Efforts
New application development & implementation: six months
The Benefits
- Improved planning tools have helped the organization move from reactive management to proactive management of its outsourced IT services, saving the company significant time and money
- Improved financial controls over spending on outsourced IT services
- Increased data analysis capabilities now allow users greater flexibility in how they can “drill down” to the supporting detail they need to make better decisions
- Billable time on contractor invoices can now be reconciled more quickly and easily because the Accounts Payable Dept. has better and more timely access to key data such as number of hours and for which department each contractor worked
- Increased data quality
- Human Resources Dept. has a better system to review records and correct errors such as hire date, termination date, etc.
- Contracted IT partners now use the tool to manage their own interactions with the client
