Introduction
A leading German financial services organization operating in 58 countries spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia sought enhanced efficiencies for its extensive portfolio of 2,500 applications. These applications covered a spectrum of critical functions, including investment banking, corporate banking, HR, finance, risk and compliance. HCLTech strategically introduced ASM 2.0, a next-gen framework that redefines application support and maintenance to ensure more efficient application support operations.
The Challenge
Redundant applications, impeding efficiency, increasing costs and heavy dependence on subject matter experts
Our client grappled with allocating efforts toward supporting redundant applications ,diverting attention from potential efficiency gains through lean and problem management initiatives. This undermined operational focus and incurred additional infrastructure costs due to the inefficient lifecycle management of the application portfolio within the production environment. The existing support structure faced a substantial reliance on subject matter experts, even for routine tasks like health checks and monitoring, further hindering streamlined operations.
The Objective
Strategic 'run the business' cost reduction through efficient application decommissioning
HCL Techinitiated a comprehensive analysis of the applications ecosystem and ticket data, paving the way for a strategic operating model transformation. The process unearthed various areas for improvement, providing a foundation for value addition and operational enhancement:
- eliminate manual monitoring through our client's toolsets with dedicated automation
- Establish a factory model to decrease the number of tickets by improving problem management
- Lower IT costs with a focus on application decommissioning
The Solution
ASM framework to drive comprehensive transformation
HCLTech leveraged the capabilities of its ASM 2.0 framework to achieve the predetermined objectives.
- Implemented a portfolio-based approach across business lines spanning multiple business functions to fully align IT with the business.
- Estate simplification through established application decommissioning model
- Implemented agile horizontal teams to enhance operational efficiency by streamlining the handling of standard tickets through SOPs
- Implemented proactive problem management techniques to conduct root cause analysis to eliminate repeat tickets
- Implemented full-stack automation to introduce end-to-end observability and self-healing capabilities.
- Implemented application-based pricing through elaborate detailing of application characteristics for complete transparency and predictability of IT spend.
The Impact
Operational brilliance and significant cost reductions unveiled
The executed solution delivered impressive results, underscoring our commitment to operational brilliance and tangible results:
- ~70% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- 700 apps decommissioned to date
- 4,400 incidents and 1,800 service requests eliminated permonth
- 2,300 manual checks eliminated, resulting in enhanced availability with no unplanned outages
