CIO imperatives for the 'new normal'

Reducing costs and improving throughput with hyper-automation app-ops led by platforms

Summary

While many organizations have well-formed Business Continuity Plans, nobody really expected the scenario that is unfolding before us. While some industries will be the unintended beneficiaries of this 'new normal', it's more likely that most organizations are going to face a period of challenge and uncertainty. With economic pressures mounting, businesses seek to drive out costs and maintain customer engagement with uncompromised quality, while also supporting a larger-than-planned remote workforce. In this whitepaper, we have outlined how we see the present difficult situation evolving from hereon, what the imperatives for the CIO are and Mindtree's proposition to address them.

The unpredictability of local/regional endemic episodes have caused localized or regional lock-downs to contain the flare up which in turn have disrupted business demand and IT staff availability. We expect a far-reaching impact in the near future on the short-to-medium term horizon, which will have a large and negative impact on both discretionary investments and Opex spends. Further, we expect IT to be operating on shoestring (lights-on) budget with the ability to scale up, if situation improves.

This new paradigm will require IT to embrace multiple cost take out initiatives to ensure that resources can be conserved and operated within shoestring budgets.

Reducing costs and improving throughput with hyper-automation

Mindtree helps drive this objective with intelligent hyper-automation and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to drive predictive maintenance capabilities in app operations. This is combined with a Digital workforce enabled by our Bots from our Bot store, that enables self-healing, which helps to reduce costs up to 55%. Delivering employee productivity with the right throughput is another key objective to keep in mind while navigating the business out of a pandemic situation. Mindtree proposes to deliver up to 25% increase in throughput with our platform-driven approach enabled by CAPE™ Integrated Intelligent Automation platform by automating the IT lifecycle enabling to bring in continuous integration, deployment, monitoring and testing, thus making continuous delivery a reality. This platform is designed to work on a multi-cloud or on-prem, enabling us to integrate and deploy it easily into the client's existing landscape and start easy automation from Day 1 of the engagement.

CAPE^TM adds value primarily in three areas:

1. Enabling intelligent automation-driven operations: Integrating Robotic Process Automation, ML and cognitive conversational capabilities from our Bot store repository to automate operations. A few prominent reusable bots include auto ticket triager/ classifier, auto-remediator, anomaly detector, query handler, access provisioning health monitors. For a leading P&C insurance company in the US, 300+ production support tasks were automated, resulting in productivity improvement and cost savings of 20%.


2. Out of the box tooling: Clients can plug-in pre-built components to enhance the value of existing toolchains and derive visualization benefits immediately. For a Fortune 500 global CPG company, we integrated CAPE^TM into their existing tools landscape by building the entire DevSecOps toolchain, resulting in 23% increase in story points delivered and 17% reduction in defect leakage.


3. Compose once deploy anywhere: Compose portable blueprints as canvas, and deploy on-prem or multi-cloud. For a leading American multinational food-manufacturing company, a green-field end-to-end DevSecOps implementation and pipeline integration with CAPE^TM as an enterprise platform was deployed on AWS, which led to streamlined release management process, and cost of operations reduced by 25%.

Mindtree recognizes the challenge posed by the present situation where there is a need to be remotely accessible and deliver the promise of automation. We rise to the occasion with remote contactless assessments enabled by our tools to assess optimization and automation opportunities in the client landscape, thereby cutting down the assessment time frame and effort.

Our experience in cost takeout

Using the hyper-automated platforms approach, we have been able to reduce costs, improve reliability and throughput for our clients in applications management and operations:

1. For a leading CPG major, we created a unified digital marketing experience across 70+ brands and 100+ countries, and reduced cost of operations by 41% via lean digital operations, automated through intelligent Bots.


2. For a leading international fashion retail brand, we provide end-to-end management of their SAP landscape with 100% offshore support, equipped with an autonomous command center leading to 50% increase in First Time Right and 45% cost savings through auto-remediation Bots.


3. For a top life, annuity, retirement and group protection insurance provider in the US, we carried out a risk-free transition of 120+ applications with zero impact to business, delivering more than $10M cost reduction over the contract duration.

Conclusion

Without a doubt the present situation poses an unprecedented challenge. This has created a war-like situation, thus leading a new paradigm of innovation and risk management where doing nothing is the biggest risk to business. The rapid progress of digital and cloud technology in the recent decade has provided the tools and technologies to navigate through these uncertain times. We, at Mindtree, have developed the capacity and competencies in hyper-automation enablement to help our customers successfully traverse this systemic disruption and embark on future growth, with flexible IT operating models and cost structures.

Download the whitepaper to learn more