COST & PERFORMANCE TRANSPARENCY FOR IT SERVICE PROVIDERS

The market for IT services is characterized by overcapacity, falling prices and deep structural changes. While the market is getting tighter in the German-speaking parts of Europe due to a lack of qualified personnel which raises prices, off-shore suppliers are entering the profitable German market in force with extremely attractive conditions. The foreign competitors successfully apply the principles of industrialization to IT – division of labor, mass production and higher transfer volumes.

To remain competitive, IT service providers are increasingly trying to consolidate organizational and service-specific basis. The important challenge for independent IT service providers is to win (back) the trust of the customers and to strengthen it.

This requires not only the ability to offer holistic solutions for the “IT to Business” requirements of the customer, but in particular the absolute transparency for all services and costs. At the same time, profitability of the service and the customer have to be closely monitored. Benchmarking and target costing are important tools as well.

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
• Execute target-performance comparisons for freely definable periods on the basis of “Info Cubes”

Transparent Calculation – Usage-Based Accounting

• Definition of a demand-oriented IT service catalog on all production levels of the IT value chain
• Automatic calculation of the production costs (TCO), taking into consideration both unit costs and overhead (job order cost accounting)
• Simulation of offers to customers
• Automatic product costing analysis for every service and customer
• Accounting for all services and services levels based on customer-specific pricing models with maximum transparency for the customer

Accurate Planning & Reporting

• Create ad hoc-reports, such as service cost analyses, turnover and profitability analysis, 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
• Forecast the cost and turnover trends to determine future service requirements
• Create and manage an unlimited number of offer or planning scenarios to simulate possible customer relationships, both for target costing or for benchmarking.

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

Efficient Use of Resources

Your IT products are customized, put together, calculated and priced on the basis of customer requirements from precursor-products of the different IT value added steps. Undesirable cost drivers are identified and eliminated. The use of IT resources can thus be controlled and managed on the basis of cost and performance criteria. This provides a reliable basis for the planning of investments in services and enables transparent cost management both in your company and in relation to your customers.

Focus on the Customer

You react timely and very flexibly to changing market conditions and customer requirements. The transparency of the data enables a dialog with the customer on a solid basis. Alternative offers are precisely calculated and compared. On-demand solutions can be simulated and checked for their profitability. You are also able to offer the usage-based accounting for IT services within the customer organization.

Higher Productivity

The automation of calculating and accounting significantly reduces 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 brought about by additional transparency. You expand your scope for active, focussed control of IT and you increase the effectiveness of your entire service organization.

Controlling and Managing of Profit Centers

As a profit-oriented service provider you can manage your customer and service portfolio on the basis of criteria related to costs, services and profitability. At the same time, you manage the production teams on the different levels of the value chain in your service organization based on the standards of a profit center.

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.