COST & PERFORMANCE TRANSPARENCY FOR IT-SERVICES IN YOUR COMPANY

In today’s business world, IT has evolved to be an important production factor. This has gone hand in hand with ever-increasing IT costs. In particular, the transaction-based services have seen a strong increase. Reporting and analyzing the value contribution and the costs brought about by business processes is one of the central tasks of the IT services department.

Achieving cost and performance transparency is the basis for benchmarking, target or activity-based costing in IT services. For this purpose, all relevant consumption and cost data has to be consolidated in one flexible IT service catalog and made available to the IT controller via automated systems.

Complex cost structures, an often confusing service catalog with an increasing number of virtual IT system environments, shrinking personnel resources, as well as the lack of a comprehensive approach and tools pose tremendous challenges to IT managers.

Cost and Performance Transparency for IT Controlling – with CATENIC Anafee™

CATENIC specializes in business critical requirements of IT and Shared Services organizations. Anafee™ is the most powerful solution available today for efficient controlling of costs and value added in the area of IT services on the basis of a “classic” costing methodology.

Comprehensive Analysis of Cost Drivers

• Find relevant IT cost drivers in physical and virtual infrastructures, projects and applications.
• Evaluate turnover, costs and consumption rates of IT services based on functional, technical and organizational criteria.
• Identify inefficient processes by assigning all costs and service activities to their respective business processes.
• Execute target-performance comparisons for freely definable periods on the basis of “Info Cubes”.

Transparent Calculation – Usage-Based Accounting

• Define a fully standardized IT services catalog based on individual business requirements and processes.
• Calculate the service costs (TCO) through a fully automated process, taking into account both direct costs and overhead (cost unit accounting); calculate and report internal transfer prices.
• Use Anafee together with your ERP system (e.g. SAP) to charge all process-related service costs on the basis of the costs-by-cause principle.

Accurate Planning & Reporting

• Create ad hoc-reports, such as transfer price analyses, cost types/cost center analyses, time series or variance analyses, etc. with a fully web-based reporting tool.
• Flexibly generate reports and charts such as service accounts, management overviews and cost schedules and automatically distribute them.
• Plan service quantities and forecast costs for future service demands.
• Create and manage multiple planning scenarios to simulate future business developments or for benchmarking purposes.

Implementing CATENIC Anafee™ - start easily, extend flexibly

Anafee is not only a flexible and easy-to-use standard software, but also a comprehensive integrated solution from a single source. In addition to the individual configuration and integration of the software into your system environment, CATENIC offers comprehensive consulting services and numerous “best practice templates” for the swift implementation of transparent controlling structures in your company.

The financial data from the ERP system (usually SAP) are imported as the basis for the calculation into Anafee and after the calculation, transmitted back to the leading accounting system in a suitable format. The necessary consumption and resource information can be consolidated from virtually any type of structured data source. Furthermore, a certified interface to the SAP NetWeaver™ platform enables a transaction-oriented accounting of SAP applications. The open architecture of Anafee, pre-defined designs for standardized service catalogues as well as the know-how of CATENIC are the key for extremely quick project implementations and enable you to start using the solution almost immediately.

After only a few days of “on-the-job” training, key users are able to operate, administrate and improve the system on their own. In general, Anafee requires less than an hour per month for internal system maintenance.

TRANSPARENT IT CONTROLLING EXPANDS YOUR SCOPE OF POSSIBILITIES

Active Control of Services

All IT services are aligned with the requirements of your internal and external customers, transparently calculated and charged according to actual use. IT capacities can be allocated flexibly by changing consumption rates. The tight tracking of the consumption rates and their costs provides a reliable basis for planning of future service investments and enables transparent cost management of the entire company.

Cost-Effective Service Performance

Provide accurate and clear reports and accounts in the “business language” of the customers. Clearly identify and eliminate inefficient processes in cooperation with management and the individual departments. Improve services sustainably and raise user awareness of the cost of IT resources through the strong focus on the customer.

Higher Productivity

The automation of calculating and accounting significantly decreases the process costs in the IT finance management. Expensive manual work for pulling together financial and consumption data for planning, accounting and reporting is avoided. User examples show a sustained reduction of infrastructure resources and net IT investments. You expand your scope for active, focussed control of IT and you increase the effectiveness of your entire service organization.

Strategic Integration

Demonstrate the value proposition of your services for every single business process as well as with regard to the overall financial success of the company. You show your competitive strength in comparison to external service providers and create a strategic “sourcing option” for future IT investment decisions.

State of the Art IT Governance

Support the achievement of strategic business objectives via highly effective IT governance that is orientated towards the latest industry standards such as ITIL. The expanded version of ITIL v3.0 requires a demand-oriented service design with different perspectives (e.g. business perspective, financial perspective, etc.) and the appropriate metrics such as process and financial performance.

Legal Compliance

Anafee supports the compliance with regulations for accounting and revision-safe archiving, as well as legal documentation requirements regarding corporate transfer pricing to group divisions at home and abroad. A stringent authorization and role concept of the user administration in combination with a complete and detailed log ensures sustainable auditability.