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Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Optimises ICT Expenditure with CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY CLIENT PROFILE Company: FCA Group Industry: Automotive manufacturing Revenues: €110.6 billion Employees: 238,162 in 31 Dec 2015 BUSINESS The seventh-largest car manufacturer in the world, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) manufactures and markets cars, commercial vehicles, parts and engines worldwide. CHALLENGE To support its advanced ICT budgeting process, FCA Italy needed a solution to improve efficiency and reduce processing times, while boosting ICT staff’s productivity. SOLUTION FCA Italy implemented CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS to manage its dynamic ICT budgeting process. The tool is used by 200 staff members to process 8,000 budget change requests every year. BENEFIT The IT budgeting process is now far more responsive, enabling FCA Italy to combine business agility and ICT savings. Transparency and collaboration have also improved.

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Page 1: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Optimises ICT Expenditure with ... · Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Optimises ICT Expenditure ... ICT budgeting process, ... Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Optimises

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Optimises ICT Expenditure with CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

CLIENT PROFILECompany: FCA GroupIndustry: Automotive manufacturingRevenues: €110.6 billionEmployees: 238,162 in 31 Dec 2015

BUSINESSThe seventh-largest car manufacturer in the world, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) manufactures and markets cars, commercial vehicles, parts and engines worldwide.

CHALLENGETo support its advanced ICT budgeting process, FCA Italy needed a solution to improve effi ciency and reduce processing times, while boosting ICT staff’s productivity.

SOLUTIONFCA Italy implemented CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS to manage its dynamic ICT budgeting process. The tool is used by 200 staff members to process 8,000 budget change requests every year.

BENEFITThe IT budgeting process is now far more responsive, enabling FCA Italy to combine business agility and ICT savings. Transparency and collaboration have also improved.

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2 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: FIAT CHRYSLER AUTOMOBILES

FCA Italy is the heart of the European Fiat Chrysler Automobiles group, the seventh largest manufacturer or cars in the world. The company is headquartered in Turin, and strives to uphold Fiat’s pedigree while also managing two prestigious Italian brands: Alfa Romeo and Lancia. It also sells Jeep-branded vehicles.

FCA operates from 164 production sites and 84 research and development centres. It also conducts its business through companies located in 40 countries and has commercial relationships with customers in approximately 150 countries.

FCA is headquartered in Turin, Italy, where the Italian IT division of the group is also based. This organisation, which employs 200 people, manages the IT functions for the EMEA activities of the group.

One of the most notable features of expense management model at FCA Italy is the relationship with company departments who use ICT services.

Andrea Pomettini, ICT Planning and Control Manager at FCA Italy, explains, “In the traditional model, the central ICT function has its own budget and uses it to satisfy the requests of all corporate departments. In our model, our role as the ICT division is to manage the budget and address consistency and synergy, ensuring we make the right decisions to meet the demand for ICT services. The costs resulting from these activities trickle down into the budget statement of the departments that use the services, in proportion to their use.”

This charge-back model offers a key benefi t, as Pomettini explains: “Our internal customers, or business departments, are now completely aware of the cost/benefi t ratio of every ICT purchase they make, so they are co-responsible for their choices. This helps FCA Group to optimise its ICT expenditure.”

It is, however, more diffi cult to implement. “Budgeting is a dynamic process; several changes and updates are required during the year to quickly reallocate resources, in order to keep FCA competitive. Every change has to be processed and evaluated by our ICT staff, which takes time and effort,” explains Pomettini.

Mature management skills are essential to the success of the charge-back model, but not enough. “We needed a specifi c tool to support this process in order to improve the productivity of our ICT staff. We wanted a solution that would helpus to save time, avoid errors, add rich data about the aim of each purchase and eliminate the need to work on our SAP platform directly, which would be complex and unpractical,” adds Pomettini.

Initially, FCA addressed this challenge by using a multidimensional database, but the solution wasn’t adequate: it lacked automation capabilities and the operation functionality to verify the data managed.

ca.com

BusinessThe European heart of the FCA Group

ChallengeControlling ICT process expenditure while increasing productivity

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3 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: FIAT CHRYSLER AUTOMOBILES ca.com

SolutionAn effective platform for planning and control activities

FCA realised that one option would be to use a project and portfolio management solution.

“The budgeting process is essentially a year-long project with its own lifecycle and data. After evaluating several PPM tools, we chose CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS,” Pomettini recalls.

Implementation took place in 2012. Customisation was carried out with the help of CA Services for programming, while FCA’s ICT staff were responsible for confi guration. FCA chose the cloud-based option initially to reduce project risks by enabling simpler and cheaper implementation.

“CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS turned out to be a perfect fi t for our needs,” says Pomettini. “First of all because of its confi gurability. This allowed us to embed a series of automated consistency checks that prevent our internal customers from making trivial mistakes when entering their description for budget items or budget changes. For example, if an ICT initiative is described as a new project, CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS provides the user with a list of cost item options that does not include maintenance costs. Also, the tool offers a number of time saving features, such as portlets, copy-and-paste capabilities and context-sensitive auto-fi ll.”

The solution is also helping the planning and control ICT team, who are responsible for checking budget change requests and looking for trends to defi ne strategies. “When users enter a request we get an immediate alert from CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS and can perform our checks very quickly,” explains Pomettini. “With the old solution, this process used to involve exchanging fi les and email messages, which was messy and time consuming. In addition, now we have a series of dashboards and reporting facilities, which allows the team to identify trends and events as they appear, so they can react quickly.”

The scalability of CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS provides additional benefi ts, as Pomettini explains: “CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS’s modular structure enabled us to implement the tool in a gradual manner. We started with just a basic module for collecting budget data, then we added the automatic checks and other capabilities, such as the purchase authorisation process. Gradual implementation reduced our confi guration effort and – along with CA Productivity Accelerator – facilitated user adoption.”

CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS is now used by approximately 200 staff members in FCA Italy’s ICT division to manage 2,000 main budgets per year (across approximately 20,000 retail locations in 2015), charging expenses on 800 internal customers accounts.

By improving transparency and collaboration for ICT staff, the CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS solution has taken the responsiveness of the FCA ICT budgeting process to new heights. “We are currently processing as many as 8,000 budget change requests per year, and my supervising team is able to react quickly to each of them – granting or denying approval, and providing explanations for its

“ CA Project and Portfolio Management SaaS turned out to be a perfect fit for our needs.”Andrea PomettiniICT Planning & Control Manager, FCA Italy

Benefi tIncreasing ICT spending control and greater transparency into the relationships between ICT and business functions

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4 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: FIAT CHRYSLER AUTOMOBILES

8,000 budget change requests processed with CA Project and Portfolio Management SaaS in 2015

decisions: before deploying the solution that could take two or three days, but now it’s down to less than one,” says Pomettini.

“This means that we can be much more responsive to the changing ICT needs of our business, while at the same time realising the full saving potential of our ICT expenditure management scheme,” continues Pomettini. “We can stick to corpo-rate deadlines for reporting and also respond quickly to impromptu needs, which shows how effective our use of CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS has proved to be.”

As well as the ease of implementation, choosing the cloud option of CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS has delivered additional benefi ts to FCA. “We are staying with the SaaS option as it gives us a lot of fl exibility. We don’t have to worry about our infrastructure or updates to the platform, and we can easily share data on CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS with our colleagues across the globe,” says Pomettini.

By implementing CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS, FCA Italy has been able to:

• Optimise ICT expenditure

• Improve business agility

• Enhance transparency and collaboration

• Increase the productivity of its ICT personnel.

“Over the past few years FCA has managed to hit ambitious performance and operation targets. CA Project & Portfolio Management SaaS has helped my team contribute to this achievement,” Pomettini concludes.

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