PON, one of the largest Dutch family businesses, is an international trading and service company with a wide range of activities. Pon employs almost 13,000 people at over 450 locations in 32 countries.
PON’s IT organization is an independent non-profit company. PON IT provides IT support and services to Pon businesses and users in different countries. In recent months, the PON IT team was working on a services model and a cost model (Activity Based Costing).
In the fourth quarter of 2014 PON wanted to compare its IT costs budgeted for 2015 with the market. PON IT asks METRI for a cost assessment and cohesion of the Datacentre services. The following questions were part of the assignment scope;
- What are the costs of Datacentre operations of Pon IT?
- How high are the costs relative to the market?
- Where are the opportunities for improvement?
The results of the assessment were used at PON IT internally to address proactively. The assessment had to be transparent and objective and also any missing factors in the cost model needed to be identified.
The cost model of PON technology (also called the ABC model) has many similarities with the METRI model in terms of allocation of costs to market services. FTEs were allocated to these services.
After several workshops to explore the basic services and the volume of PON IT, METRI’s benchmark team has done a comparison on what these services would cost in a peer group. Additionally, the productivity of the FTEs was measured and compared.
METRI also answered an additional question “How much should a CPU, a Gigabyte of memory and a Gigabyte of storage cost?” and explained the differences between the prices PON paid and the market prices.
The costs of PON IT are almost equal to the reference group, but there are large differences between the services. For the services where Pon paid much more than market average, PON has clarified the differences together with METRI in order for PON to achieve a realistic image of the market.
In the future PON wants to keep comparing the cost of the Datacentre with the market using the METRI ITFacts4you service and is also wants to compare the workplace costs with the market.