Our client is a British multinational insurance company headquartered in London. It has over 30 million customers across more than a dozen countries. In the UK, it is one of the largest general insurers and a leading life and pensions provider.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
Our client transferred data from multiple source systems, often involving manual intervention, into the IT Services models in MS Excel. This spreadsheet model was prone to error and operation was dependent on a few key staff. There was inconsistency of the data used to drive costs and the allocation logic was not transparent. This lack of transparency meant that Finance found it time consuming and difficult to explain the basis of charges to customer department. This meant that business units didn’t know how to influence the costs that they were charged.
SOLUTION
The IT services cost model was re-developed in Anaplan. This technology enabled transparent, accurate cost allocation using the drivers of cost that end users understand. Anaplan is distributed to business users who input the volume of services they plan to consume for a budget period. Users can monitor actual consumption and adjust their requirements during the year. IT can then see and approve changes in demand for services ,and calculate the impact on IT costs, as the budget period progresses. Process and workflow are fully automated and re-charges are calculated and available to business user reports instantly. IT management now have real time information relating to the changing shape of the services they are providing.
BENEFITS
IT are now confident that IT service re-charges are accurate and transparent to business units. They have a much better understanding of how IT resources are consumed to support IT decisions. IT can track and monitor changes to cost and drivers and the impact across the business.
IT have up to the minute cost to serve data. They can constantly monitor the impact of changes in demand on IT services, enabling them to manage their resources better.
Business are now able to influence IT services charges according to their rate of consumption. This has minimised queries to the re-charge team substantially.
“Profit& did not just replicate the solution we had before, they were able to provide expert advise on issues relating to model validation and ‘what if’ modelling. This improved our ability to leverage the solution to make better IT decisions.”
Cost IT Project Manager
“IT are now better able to manage IT resources based on changing demands from the business, which has helped us to reduce the overall cost of IT without impacting the quality of services provided.”
