At a glance
Company
Global chemical company
Key figures
Employees: 95,000
80 production facilities
USU Solution
USU IT Asset Management
Challenge
The customer is a global leader in chemical products. In total, the company has more than 95,000 employees at more than 80 locations. The IT portfolio is extremely complex, with many applications running on its own servers (on premises) as well as increasing applications in the cloud. In 2021 the company launched a program to increase transparency of enterprise software and cloud services. The company engaged USU to help the IT department reduce spending on software and SaaS.
Solution
During the three-year project collaboration, we worked closely with the customer on several use cases to create transparency and optimization. We helped the IT department’s purchasing team to get visibility into their software estate as the organization’s SAM tooling project was struggling. Our consulting team accelerated the ingestion of data into the SAM tool and ensured that the data was useful to the purchasing and SAM and FinOps teams.
We also provided in-depth expertise to help the team interpret several vendor rules and contracts, such as Salesforce and Microsoft, as well as analyze cloud consumption of hyperscalers, such as Azure. Several USU consultants cooperatively work on streamlining the customer’s processes. Our experts help manage contracts and deadlines with key publishers, monitor renewals and other deadlines, keep the SAM solution up to date, and continually monitor software and SaaS spending through an efficient demand management process
I’m happy about the co-created optimization success for our major software vendors in the outstanding collaboration within the project team between our License Management organization and USU. With the engineered solution we have now a sustainable and market-proven license optimization that we were able to integrate seamlessly into our existing internal and external services.Customer citation
Result
USU consultants were able to provide senior decision makers with a clear picture of the estate, compliance risks, and remediation opportunities to help them make quick and effective decisions. Our client’s initial target of $6.1 million in cost savings and avoidance was exceeded by 48%, reaching $9.1 million.
Besides the cost optimization effects, the USU approach has enabled the customer to improve governance, teaching the IT and purchasing teams some best practices to contain and challenge software spending.