The Technology Team savings

Contributing to the common effort: The Technology Team

In alignment with the company’s strategy to achieve the financial turnaround this year, the Technology team has put a lot of efforts in to deliver the expected results and still be a global provider of Technology for the company and allowing it to fulfil its growth, vision and mission.

Important actions were taken in order to reduce drastically reduce the amount of money invested on a daily basis and by thinking outside the box we have already been able to achieve an impressive result.

This article gives you a quick overview of what has been done in that respect, with potential savings of 550K yearly thanks to new technology stack, contract supplier reviews, software licenses reviews and personnel savings. Alongside with these savings we also saw better performance with tools implementation that are more efficient for the employees, for example new agile softwares, Suite CRM, Payslips online, elearning platform, the new intranet and much more.

Who is the Technology Team again?

The “Technology team” has a large panel of activities and is divided in different teams. Toby Russell is leading them all. Here is where each one of them has realised savings:

• Digital Transformation: by bringing all our websites in-house onto a single platform, we are saving money and resources, which will eventually make us more efficient:
  • Snazaroo and Liquitex are already managed in-house and we have stopped working with Northwind, saving £30k+ per year.
  • A key focus for this year is to relaunch Winsor & Newton onto our in-house platform, which will save over £90k once completed.
• Improving our brands websites drives value, e.g. since the relaunch of the Liquitex e-Commerce website we have delivered more sales in 4 months than during all of 2017.
  • Next relaunches are Snazaroo and then Winsor & Newton.
  • The introduction of personalisation onto the Liquitex website allows us to drive more value and ultimately more sales
• In-house management of all our 30 Social Media channels from content planning to execution, including publishing and paid social management
• The change of marketing email platform from Pure 360 to Dotdigital, a much more efficient and comprehensive platform that we can manage much more in-house, with more flexibility and more consistent to the way we bring our brands to life. We have already seen a +15% increase in performance.

Stop the contract with Merit and bringing the support in-house and reviewing the mobile lines at Le Mans could save €98.4K

• The Merit support has been discontinued, saving €90k
• The mobile subscriptions have been updated in Le Mans, saving €8.4k

Global WAN Refresh

In 2017 a project was undertaken by the infrastructure team to refresh and replace all of the legacy and traditional networking equipment across group with state-of-the-art Cisco Meraki networking stack at every site. An initial capex investment of £120,000 was needed to deliver the project which was completed at the end of December 2018.

Due to the change in technology we have now been able to replace expensive MPLS (is a routing technique in telecommunications networks that directs data from one node to the next ) lines with alternative internet-only lines without disruption alongside considerably improving services.

Savings have been made of approximately £115,000 per year by reducing our MPLS bills from £17,516 in December 2018 to £7,857 from August 2019 onwards with further savings to be made in the future. Return on investment was made in the 2nd year of the project, with continual savings moving forward still to happen.

UK/EU Co-Location Data Centre

2018 saw the implementation of the core data centre project in the UK, to consolidate and migrate legacy systems and physical servers to a central 24/7 dedicated data centre with brand-new hyper converged infrastructure equipment. 90% of all European sites (outside of Le Mans) have been successfully migrated (with more to come) alongside expensive cloud-based systems such as Documation (with a saving of £24,000 per year)

Savings are also made by the following:

• Consolidating and reducing backup software systems and licenses: Approx. £10,000 p/a in savings
• Local hardware warranties: Approx. £10,000 p/a in savings
• Power consumption: Variable savings
• International and local travel to site for break/fix: Variable savings

Personnel (People we let go and didn’t replace) Savings

Due to the enhancement into infrastructure platforms across the group, personnel savings have been made in excess of £100,000 per annum.

All in all, for the Infrastructure Team, taking into account all of the above, we are looking at around £235,000 saved now on compared to 24 months ago from the various infrastructure initiatives and personnel changes.

Below you will see between reviewing licenses, negotiating better deal with phone supplier a savings of: £69K

Here is a summary of the savings the Tech Support team realised year to date:

• Adobe: £5,326 saved
• Mobile: £18,051 saved
• Microsoft Office: £24,493 saved
• Personnel (People we let go and didn’t replace): £21,000 saved

The decommissioning of Cognos (BI tool used today at Colart) support saved about £19k per year.

Conclusion

2019 sees the technology team reinventing themselves, thinking outside the box and perform extremely well on savings where it was possible. This is now our mindset and we won’t stop here, we will keep looking in opportunities to improve as part of our DNA.

If you have any doubt or question please reach out to any of the tech-head above!