Date Published: 03/18/2014
Maximilien Moriceau, Sales Engineer at Fujitsu RunMyProcess, sums up the case study breakfast RunMyProcess hosted together with Cirruseo, on March 11, with a testimonial from Joseph Bejjani, CIO of Zodiac Marine and Pool.
Leadership is not about being the biggest group: it’s about being the fastest moving organization
Back in 2011, Zodiac managed a portfolio of three main activities: Pool Care (e.g. pool cleaning robots and equipments) Marine (small boats and cruises), and Environment. In 2012, the group was restructured and the Marine and Environment entities were sold. The new core business was set around the Pool Care equipment. The new tailored group was designed to succeed in a fast changing industry and four fusion-acquisitions were achieved that year.
The new organization implemented a new strategy, aiming to be more agile, to fit markets with adapted ranges of products, to strengthen its presence in main markets, to develop its capacity to innovate and launch new products frequently.
Furthermore, as the core business changed and the group went even more international with 2500 employees on 40 sites, on 5 continents (now entities in the USA, Europe, Northern Africa, Australia and China) – new business needs appeared. Zodiac faced an increasing need for mobility and collaborative tools.
Best IT – is “disposable” IT
With the new entities, Zodiac inherited a legacy of heterogeneous IT systems and hardware (including Domino servers), an expensive ecosystem of collaborative solutions, few human resources for internal developments and a LBO context. Zodiac also had to find a way to manage its costs. In summary, Zodiac identified three objectives: unification of the IT, optimization of costs with projects allowing 1-2 year ROI and constuction of a more agile IT system, able to adapt to business needs.
“‘Disposable’ is not a bad word,” said Joseph Bejjani, CIO of Zodiac. Disposable apps and infrastructures help achieve a vision where IT is not perceived to be costly, and meets both the business’s evolving needs and the IT governance requirements.Today, the ROI with RunMyProcess applications is so rapid that Zodiac is able to shut them down after one or two years, only months if necessary.
Adapting applications’ life cycles to business cycles was the critical criteria the IT department of Zodiac was looking for.
Seizing agility
At the end of 2013, Zodiac migrated its email service (from both IBM and Microsoft servers) and IBM Lotus Notes applications to a cloud environment with Google Apps and RunMyProcess.
Thanks to the migration, Zodiac was able to reduce its IT costs by 5%, increase mobility and accessibility for all their worldwide users, and last but not the least, drastically increase the time-to-market of projects: up to 3 months instead of months of developments and integration.
How to start and what to do next?
150 Lotus Notes applications, Sharepoints, 1900 mailboxes on MS Exchange and Lotus V8, webconference tools, file storage and sharing… Those were the main items on the IT inventory list made in June 2011. The first step was the evaluation of the solutions that diagnosticated that Google Apps, in Zodiac’s case, was the least expensive solution with the highest potential of evolution. Google Apps also could offer a great integration with value added tools such as RunMyProcess.
Next, the Lotus Notes applications were divided into three categories. One category was set to migrate into the RunMyProcess platform. At this point, Zodiac realised the potential advantages of RunMyProcess for Zodiac in terms of agility. Thanks to RunMyProcess, the IT department of Zodiac was able to launch projects in weeks, hand-in-hand with the business users, and reducing costs at the same time.
Now, new ideas and opportunities are emerging with those new tools. In 2013, RunMyProcess helped Zodiac automate a paper- and Excel-based process, the new product registration process into the Oracle ERP.This application was developed in only 20 days.
Today, Zodiac is further discovering the potential of RunMyProcess for every function of the company and thinking about the next processes that can be automated to generate even more economies of scale.
