By using ISM Canada’s Application Management Services, the client - a leading western Canadian retail cooperative realized the benefits from ISM managing and growing the team of 20+ full-time resources to support their portfolio of 200 applications across five lines of business.

Challenge

Our client is a leading wholesaling, manufacturing, marketing and administrative co-operative in western Canada. The client needed a partner who would take ownership of their legacy application services. This partner would bring technical leadership and a commitment to continuous improvement. The right partner would also provide schedule acceleration, enhanced delivery to the stakeholders and shared risk.

Solution

The ISM Canada solution was to provide the client with an end-to-end mainframe application support model. This model provides reduced application support costs as well as access to a larger pool of skilled resources. This strategic outsourcing model allowed the client to free up existing skilled resources to lead transformational initiatives. With a team of over 20 full-time resources (including both re-badged and net new team members), ISM Canada now supports the client portfolio of 200 applications across five lines of business and across 14 different technologies.

The custom support model includes:

• Application rationalization and modernization
• Application operations and sustainment
• Application testing, quality assurance, and release management
• Application and IT architecture
• Application development
• Business analysis
• Project management

Result

The successful partnership yields many business benefits. The client enjoys a stable application environment that meets the needs of their business users, while transformational initiatives continue to progress. By supporting the client’s transformation initiatives to replace legacy mainframe applications with new applications, business users are experiencing an improvement in both capabilities and responsiveness. The client also saw an overall reduction in mainframe application support costs, allowing them to shift funding and skilled personnel to higher value activities supporting transformational initiatives. The partnership with ISM Canada also gives the client the continued flexibility to adjust the level of application support they require based on their evolving business needs.