Case Study
Global News Distribution Company Reduces IT Spend by 30% in Year 1 and 10% YOY with Enterprise Applications Support
Download Case StudyClient - Business Wire
Industry - Public Relations and Communications
About the Client
Business Wire is a public relations and communications global market leader in commercial news distribution. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. The company disseminates full-text press releases from thousands of member companies and organizations worldwide to news media, financial markets, disclosure systems, investors, information websites, databases, bloggers, social networks and other audiences. Business Wire was founded in 1961 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Managed Services Support Coupled with New Operation Manual Reduces Dependencies and Streamlines Operations
Jade Global’s support team was brought in to Business Wire to maintain its legacy technology. Business Wire received AMS support from Jade Global for its EBS modules including Financials/SCM, Hyperion, SFDC, and CRM. Jade provided 24X7 DBA support, 16X5 operation support, and 24X7 P1 support outside of business hours.
Jade outlined a plan to slowly shift Business Wire’s publishing software to the latest technology, which grants editing rights and access to more users outside of the core legacy team. In the new software, control is given to Business Wire editors directly. This eliminates back and forth requests, delays and depending on IT teams and channels to publish content.
Prior to working with Jade, Business Wire lacked a comprehensive day-to-day operation manual for employees to reference for streamlining operations in the legacy system, irrespective of those already maintaining it. Jade created an operation manual to remove redundancies in Business Wire’s support model and to reduce dependencies. Once the manual was instituted, it enabled a wider range of users (who were not as technologically savvy) to maintain the system. With this new manual, less training of Business Wire employees is required, taking the variable of heavy dependencies out of the picture and reducing down time.
IT Landscape:
- Oracle EBS 11.5.10.2, Cloud ERP
- Oracle Right Now – Service Cloud
- Salesforce.com – Sales Cloud, Marketing cloud, Apttus
- Complex Integration – Dell Boomi, Web Methods
- Legacy Web Applications
- Database Support – Oracle, MariaDB
- Custom Application– Python, php etc.
- Datacenter: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and in-house
Initiating the Shift away from Legacy Technology
Business Wire is in the media publishing industry. At the time of the engagement with Jade Global, its publishing software was written in outdated legacy technology. They were using an old version of Java and content management. In addition, there were only a few employees at Business Wire trained to work in this old technology, which meant the entire organization was heavily dependent on a select group of trained people. Furthermore, Business Wire’s IT Management and IT teams were heavily involved in day-to-day support, leaving them unable to focus on strategic long-term projects.
Business Wire was looking to move to a more user-friendly and relevant system. They wanted the ability to pass information to their editors directly, rather than rely on a select number of employees trained in legacy technology. Before making the shift to new publishing software, Business Wire needed external support of its existing legacy applications so its internal team could work on a solution to onboard new technology.
Business Requirements
- 24X7 support requirement for global users (US, EMEA, APAC)
- Larger focus on strategic projects and priorities by the BSA and IT teams
- Requirement to move to proactive support
- Improvement in the knowledge management to avoid dependency on specific people
- Effective management of hosting provider to avoid deployment and performance issues
- Create a single vendor relation who can support the complete IT footprint and achieve:
- Cost Benefits
- Increase Customer Satisfaction
- Help Transformation initiatives
Business Challenges
Strong requirement to free up budget for strategic projects; Migration to Oracle Cloud, re-Implementing Salesforce etc.
Large vendor management overhead due to managing independent contractors from 10+ vendors
IT Management and IT team involved heavily in day-to-day support and unable to focus on strategic projects
Business Value Delivered
Working with Jade Global empowered Business Wire with a variety of value-adds at a macro level. The company was able to shift its focus to more strategic initiatives for business growth. Additional employee bandwidth allowed Business Wire to build new technology for publishing. The cost savings afforded Business Wire to move from Web Methods integration support to Dell Boomi. Business Wire is now able to focus on transforming its entire EBS footprint to the cloud, including retiring a legacy marketing app to Salesforce.
The Benefits
- Overall IT spend on support and Development of maintaining existing application reduced by 30% in year 1 (Approximately $700k savings)
- Ongoing reduction in support from year 2 by productivity improvement (approximately 10% YOY)
- Integration Support – additional budget enabled Business Wire to move from Web Methods to Boomi
- Legacy Web Applications – retiring web applications to existing IT investments (E.g. marketing legacy app movement to Salesforce)
- Improved exception handling
The Solution
- AMS support for EBS modules (Financials/SCM, Hyperion, SFDC CRM)
- Efficient DBA Support (24X7)
- 16X5 Operation support, 24X7 P1 support outside business hours
- Problem management to reduce reoccurring issues brought backlog down by 50%
- Jade Created an operation manual to improve operations and reduce heavy dependencies
- Streamlined Order-to-Cash process to reduce shipping and logistics issues
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