With a highly competitive market and deep reliance on IT to deliver new and existing services, the telecom sector requires robust applications that provide optimum functionality at the lowest possible cost.
Here is how Mindtree consolidated more than 430 applications across 11 countries for a leading provider of mobility solutions to reduce costs while improving responsiveness, ahead of the customer's deadline.
The challenge
The customer faced productivity and technical issues due to multiple IT teams across countries, often using outdated technologies and confronting a growing list of redundant applications. At the same time, business-critical applications were directly modified in production environment without repository control, leading to significant business risks. Specifically, the telecom major was experiencing:
- High total cost of ownership with suboptimal productivity
- Governance issues due to IT teams functioning independently across countries
- Outdated technology with poor support in the market
- Non scalability of existing systems
- Lack of service-level agreements (SLAs) and operating-level agreements (OLAs)
- Lack of configuration management and centralized repository control
The customer chose Mindtree for our ability to rapidly transition their application support from an in-house to hybrid model while driving centralization.
Our solution
Mindtree first undertook an analysis to understand the critical pieces of each application and it's interface. We then set up a ‘Service Center’ team and devised a structured plan for the transition of 430+ applications across 11 countries. Our overarching goals were to ensure business continuity, with equal or higher quality of service after the transition.
To do this, we focused on knowledge transfer from the customer's subject matter experts, documenting this knowledge and understanding each application and its points of failure. We then created development environments from scratch and identified issues, dependencies and other key points.
As we undertook the transition to a centralized hub, we successfully met a number of challenges such as a high degree of complexity in the applications coupled with low level of knowledge on the part of employees; local laws that governed the sharing the data; and shifting project scope. This was accomplished by following best practices and project management excellence that identified challenges and alternate courses of action in advance.
Business impact
- Projected saving of 45% in application maintenance and support
- Centralized application maintenance and support with better scalability
- Creation of central repository for all applications
- Application support driven by SLA and OLA
- 10-15% reduction of repeatable incidents
- Reduction in defect fixing, customer support and refactoring costs
- Centralization of 11 individual country IT team functions
- Common service management tool across 11 countries
