WGroup is brought in by a Fortune 100 corporation to restart a stalled RFP effort and guide its IT sourcing strategy. With a contract deadline looming, the client brought in WGroup to restart a stalled RFP effort and guide its IT sourcing strategy beyond incremental improvements toward service providers capable of delivering transformative advances in automation, efficiency, and effectiveness. Having these differentiated and variously priced options saved the client money and alleviated service concerns by appropriately targeting workloads to the delivery model that best fit the needs.

1. Opportunity
The client, a global manufacturer with
business units in aerospace, automation
and control systems, materials
engineering, and transportation
systems, sought market alternatives to
its long but unsatisfactory relationship
with the service provider operating its
enterprise IT infrastructure.The service
relationship consumed a large portion
of total IT infrastructure spending,
including mainframe computing,
all servers and storage, identity and
access management (IAM), and all
database and web hosting support.
Further— a prior project resulted in
RFP responses that failed to address
the client’s reasons for rebidding the
services or to fulfill its desires to better
leverage its computing infrastructure
for competitive advantage.
With the bidding process stalled and
the contract deadline approaching, the
client came to WGroup for help. A
team of two WGroup principals, with
collectively more than sixty years of
business and IT experience, approached
the discovery process with a thorough
understanding of what questions
needed to be answered, to whom to
ask, and how to structure the interview
process to inform and expedite the
sourcing initiative. In just six weeks,
the team interviewed sixty people,
including corporate executives, business
group presidents, IT executives and
staff at various levels to help understand
the client’s current state, its technical
and business challenges, and what it
was looking to accomplish in the future.
The team used WGroup’s proprietary,
tested methodologies to build
financial and technological models to
help design the RFP and to evaluate
the vendors’ responses.The WGroup
team named the bid document
the RFS—request for solution—
to distinguish it from the earlier,
unsuccessful RFP initiative. WGroup’s
solid understanding of suppliers
helped identify candidates with the
right capabilities that would align
well with the client’s culture and
deliver all its business objectives.
Inventory lists, scope, delegation of
responsibilities, and detailed cost
analyses developed for the RFS
and a thorough understanding of
relevant technical and legal issues
went into designing and negotiating
the service contracts. WGroup also
worked with the client to plan and
manage the transition to new service
relationships with the incumbent
and multiple new service providers.
Drive Your Business
IT Outsourcing
Transformation
WGroup Helps Fortune 100 Corporation Transform
Its Enterprise Computing Infrastructure into an
Engine for Innovation
Manufacturing | IT Infrastructure Outsourcing
1
With a contract
deadline looming,
the client brought in
WGroup to restart a stalled
RFP effort and guide its IT
sourcing strategy beyond
incremental improvements
toward service providers
capable of delivering
transformative advances
in automation, efficiency,
and effectiveness.

2. WGroup team’s RFS
initiative delivered
what the previous RFP
procurement process could
not—real business value.
Approach
WGroup brings a business perspective,
rigorous analysis methodologies,
and proprietary modeling tools to
technology sourcing and information
management initiatives. In this
engagement, the WGroup team’s
RFS initiative delivered what the
previous RFP procurement process
could not—real business value. A
sourcing strategy with its sole focus
on the procurement transaction—
squeezing vendors to get the lowest
unit cost—often results in poor
performance and unsatisfactory service
relationships. WGroup’s experience
and approach—and its skill and forte
in working with service providers on
the client’s behalf—ensure a successful
meshing of cultures and capabilities
to create long-term, value-generating
relationships. Prior to WGroup’s
involvement, several rounds of contract
renegotiations over five years had
failed to deliver the transformative
relationships the client wanted.
Optimum business value comes
only with synergy and alignment
of corporate cultures and business
strategies between the client and its
service providers. WGroup’s structured
approach adapts to each client’s
business philosophy to facilitate this
rapport so the client feels comfortable
it is picking the right solutions at the
right price from service providers
that share the client’s commitment
to mutually beneficial relationships.
WGroup adapted its methods to help
the client narrow the candidate search
to two vendors in each service category
to provide a more intensive and
interactive bidding process consistent
with the client’s contracting approach.
WGroup
2
The service providers appreciated
that WGroup’s participation in the
sourcing initiative kept the bidding
process organized and timely.The
providers knew from experience
that the RFS would accurately and
thoroughly describe the client’s current
situation and desired future state, and
that the evaluation of bids would be
objective and fair.This partnership
approach—as opposed to an adversarial
procurement process —has resulted in
more valuable service relationships.
Insights and Advice
The key differentiator between the
inadequate RFP effort and the RFS
delivered by the WGroup team was
transformation. Over the duration of
the deal, the client wanted to transform
its computing infrastructure to support
major enhancements to automation,
efficiencies, and effectiveness, and had
no confidence such transformation
could be achieved with its current
service provider. Most importantly,
the client realized its desired future
state could not be realized by taking
a typical procurement “lowest unit
cost” approach to vendor selection.The
client wanted new capabilities, like
establishing virtual cloud environments,
to improve efficiency of processes and
overall cost effectiveness. Opportunities
also existed to automate processes such
as password resets. WGroup quantified
substantial cost savings from these
and other process improvements.

3. During discovery interviews, the
WGroup team listened carefully to
what client employees at many levels
said IT was doing well and what it was
doing poorly.They designed the RFS to
address weaknesses in IT infrastructure
and deliver enhancements that would
lead to competitive advantage.
There were four breakthrough
differences in WGroup’s approach
The WGroup team helped the
client save money by broadening
service options from the previous
“one size fits all” cost model
through the following activities:
• Differentiating among “gold,”
“silver,”and “bronze”service
levels for each server. Some
business functions needed 24/7
support and high availability;
others, such as testing or
developing applications, did not.
• Bidding the work by Tower (Server,
Storage, Database, Web and Identity
Management). Some service groups
specialize in specific technologies;
breaking the work into these towers
allowed the specialized firms to
compete. If the work were bid as
a whole, those specialized firms
would have been uncompetitive.
• Breaking the work into multiple
delivery schemes. In the previous
environment all work was considered
to be ‘export controlled’, forcing
service providers to deliver all
support on shore or on site.
WGroup’s analysis established that
up to 60% of the infrastructure
might not be constrained by
those controls. By establishing a
‘subscription-based’ delivery model,
customers of the infrastructure
group would certify that their
workload was not constrained by
these restrictions and therefore could
attain an additional 25 – 30% cost
reduction over all on-shore delivery.
• Self-service provisioning for private
cloud. One of the key complaints
about service from the IT group
was extremely slow provisioning for
‘standard’ configurations.To mitigate
these issues, the development of
an internal private cloud with
self-servicing (orchestration
layer) was included in the bid.
Having these differentiated and
variously priced options saved
the client money and alleviated
service concerns by appropriately
targeting workloads to the delivery
model that best fit the needs.
IT Outsourcing Transformation
3
Having these differentiated and variously priced
options saved the client money and alleviated
service concerns by appropriately targeting workloads
to the delivery model that best fit the needs.

4. Contact Us
WGroup
301 Lindenwood Drive, Suite 301
Malvern, PA 19355
610-854-2700
Copyright © 2013 WGroup. All Rights Reserved.4
011_ECIARVCS_073113
About WGroup
Founded in 1995, WGroup is a boutique management consulting firm
that provides Strategy, Management and Execution Services to
optimize business performance, minimize cost and create value. Our
consultants have years of experience, both as industry executives and
trusted advisors, to help clients think through complicated and pressing
challenges to drive their business forward.
For more information on WGroup, visit http://thinkwgroup.com
Value Delivered
Paradoxically, the client achieved
greater cost savings by not focusing
solely on low-cost service options. An
earlier, unfinished RFP project had
projected cost savings of 30% over the
client’s previous total IT infrastructure
spend.The WGroup team’s RFS
analysis and guidance resulted in service
contracts that saved the client nearly
50% over its pre-RFS spending for
infrastructure services. A portion of
those savings goes back to the client’s
bottom line, but a sizeable fraction
funds “transformation projects”—
projects that create technology and
process improvements to help develop
and deliver new business opportunities.
To realize the most value from these
transformation projects, the WGroup
team helped the client develop
innovation councils.Through this
collaborative relationship, business and
IT can combine their strengths to tap
into creative ideas and better manage
innovation. WGroup also helped the
client improve their multi-supplier
governance model to leverage current
and future relationships with service
providers for optimum business value.
The client now has a mechanism
in place to get new products to
market faster than the competition
or develop applications that increase
process efficiencies and revenue.
The WGroup team’s
RFS analysis and
guidance resulted in service
contracts that saved the
client nearly 50% over
its pre-RFS spending for
infrastructure services.