A mid-size, trans-Tasman equipment manufacturer and service provider, working in a highly cyclical industry, and using a mixture of industry-specific hardware + software and more generic solutions. Costs vs income need to be carefully managed.
The CEO and CFO had been challenged by their board to better understand the ROI of their investments in technology. After acquisitions and through a level of autonomy for business units, there appeared to be some common business challenges being served by disparate systems.
The leadership team wanted to explore, rate and rank each system and service spend for the contribution it made to business and operational needs. Ideally, they didn't just want a point-in-time report, but enduring tools to do this themselves, helping them self-serve future decisions.
The project scoped the business and strategic needs to cover, through interviews with the senior leadership team.
Teams across the business were then engaged with a simple survey on system usage, to get a baseline of systems in use in each area.
This allowed targeted, online group sessions across NZ and Australia to do rapid discovery and simple red-amber-green scoring of operational needs, applications in use, and how well they delivered.
Data were gathered, analysed them and assessed to report on each system's performance against strategic and operational needs, versus costs, using weighted scorecards.
The CEO and CFO were able to confidently answer the board’s questions on the ROI of systems investments with clear numbers and performance assessments.
Plus, by taking front-line staff views into account, they had a prioritised view of what systems reform should create the biggest positive impact.
The findings validated some current beliefs, and yielded some useful new insights and suggestions for leveraging existing IT tools and licenses better. Some newer or updated systems now had functionality that had previously been paid for in other systems. This gave opportunities to rationalise the IT estate whilst improving capabilities.
This all helped get more from less – useful in a cyclical and somewhat unpredictable business.
