Europe’s largest manufacturer, bottler and distributor partners with Quinnox for help with integration, EDI application support and more.
This large worldwide leader embarked on an overall effort to “achieve more with less” from their IT infrastructure and resources, specifically as this mandate relates to their application portfolio. One of their main desired results was to transition support of complex (non-SAP) applications from SMEs, key development resources and costly independent contractors.
This included addressing EDI and middleware needs, a significant and mission-critical area for this global beverage powerhouse. The beverage supplier’szz EDI team was responsible for more than 1,000 trading partners, 193 carriers, 70 bottlers and 23 banks. They were looking for an integration vendor to help them bring this complex network of partners together in a more efficient way and provide the necessary 24/7 application support going forward.
Another major objective was to implement an SLA-driven model that leveraged industry standards and best practices to meet IT and business objectives. Aligning with the company’s operational strategy and helping to meet specific business goals was an overarching priority. This included reducing TCO by creating greater efficiencies.
A key component of the effort was effective rationalizing of their application portfolio with the transformation from a legacy to a strategic platform. Ensuring governance around new releases and deployments was part of the engagement as well.
The company partnered with Quinnox to address integration needs, as well as ongoing application support and maintenance. The team devised an integration strategy for migration, meeting business needs, reducing TCO and other key objectives.
After an initial assessment and expert consultation, a solution was created that leveraged Quinnox’ substantial resources to reduce the scheduled application support and maintenance transition by 30 percent, as well as meet other goals. These proprietary assets and their role in the project included:
After an initial assessment and expert consultation, a solution was created that leveraged Quinnox’ substantial resources. These methodologies and assets included:
These Quinnox processes, tools and assets were integral in reducing the scheduled application support and maintenance transition by 30 percent, and helped meet other vital project goals as well.
In addition, this dedicated application team consistently met the project goals of incident reduction by RCA using industry-standard tools like Six Sigma FMEA, Causal analysis (Ishikawa) and trend analysis.The solution also entailed a team embedding deeper into the beverage company’s SDLC processes in order to establish better governance and faster service transition to support.
The bank’s EDI and middleware integration goals were addressed as well. An FTP Drop Box was set up and connectivity tests in Cyclone were completed, as well as permanent fixes on webMethods servers. Automated processes were integrated into the system with script development too.
TCO was reduced by stabilizing applications, fixing recurring problems, using shared services, as well as onsite offshore delivery and application portfolio rationalization.
Using a much more streamlined, efficient and cost-effective approach to application support and maintenance services has netted this global beverage leader both short- and long term benefits. Using the Quinnox tools, the project schedule was significantly expedited. From a long-term perspective, it was estimated that the company would save a whopping $6.8 million over a period of 48 months.
Best of all, using a dedicated team helped increase productivity, allowing the company to reduce the number of FTEs by 105 without impacting operations. In fact, the IT team was able to:
Overall, the migration of application support and maintenance services executed and managed by Quinnox has helped this global beverage leader create much greater efficiencies, save millions of dollars, and boost operational efficiency in keeping with its longterm business strategy