Case Study
UST managed services saves grocery retailer $8.7 million in IT spend over 17 years
OUR CLIENT
Founded over a century ago, this privately held American grocery retailer operates approximately 425 locations, generates nearly $40 billion in annual revenue, and donates millions of dollars yearly to its communities.
THE CHALLENGE
Production application support for fast-growing regional grocery retailer
In 2006, the company’s internal IT team managed 145 production applications, such as Oracle ATG Web Commerce, Oracle PeopleSoft, Informatica, and WordPress. The company wanted to outsource application management to a seasoned technology vendor that could provide 24x7 support for incident and problem management, system monitoring, and service requests. The grocery retailer also wanted the tech partner to help streamline its application landscape with automations.
THE TRANSFORMATION
A best-practice managed support engagement does more than “keep the light on”
Using an offshore development center (ODC) model, UST deployed 55 tech experts to work around the clock to help the retailer manage its 145 core production applications. The team implemented an information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) to align IT services with the retailer’s business needs, including:
- SLA definitions - outlining resolution times for critical (2 hours), high (24 hours), average (up to 5 days), and low-level incidents (up to 10 days)
- An OLA compliance agreement - detailing how the IT department should support the rest of the organization
- A governance model - specifying the standardized process flow for UST’s application production support
- Metrics definitions - for things like ticket volume, customer satisfaction, and first-call resolution for UST managed services performance
In addition, UST implemented an effort to automate manual processes; manage the toil of repetitive, low-value tasks; and identify root-cause issues and fixes. A shared learning initiative has also helped elevate the company’s internal IT team’s competencies by digitizing knowledge transfer documents and offering knowledge sharing sessions, site reliability engineering (SRE) trainings, and certification trainings for retail, AWS, GCP, and various compliance policies.
THE IMPACT
Successful 17-year engagement saves 210,000 manual work hours across 245 applications
Now—more than 17 years later—UST’s team of 250 managed services associates supports the retailer’s application footprint of 245 applications. By implementing root cause fixes and automations, UST replaced 2,100 hours of manual tasks, reduced tickets by 11,500, and saved $712,000 in FY 2022 alone.
Meanwhile, since the start of the engagement in 2006, UST has helped the company save at least 210,000 manual work hours, which has contributed to a savings of $8.7 million in IT spend.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/strategy-implementation-operations