Robeco

Roll up your sleeves

“Fruition Partners has done a first-class job. We also had a good culture fit, which is important in this kind of project. We rolled up our sleeves and got the job done together.” Olivier Trouw Manager IT Operations

Central governance

Robeco was founded in Rotterdam in 1929 and has grown into a renowned independent asset management organisation. It offers a range of strategies with a variety of investment solutions and is a global leader in the field of Sustainability Investing. Olivier Trouw is head of IT Operations at Robeco, with responsibility for the central governance of the entire IT operation. Any disruption to the IT landscape has a major impact on the business, so it’s important to clarify the status of every incident and problem and resolve it as quickly as possible. That demands tight control and good tooling.

“More and more of the IT we use in IT Operations has been outsourced over the past few years and we increasingly use SaaS solutions. Partly for that reason we’ve been able to cut our operating costs year after year. On the other hand, the introduction of a large number of suppliers meant we had to manage the ITSM processes with different tools, and that made it difficult to control everything effectively from the centre. Although we had good agreements with every party, the overall set-up was inefficient. If an incident occurred we often had to call in different parties to find a solution. In such cases it’s essential that these parties have the same information. We also work with our suppliers within a worldwide organisation, so we have to deal with different time zones. In addition, we used a large number of manual interfaces, and however well you do that there’s always potential for human error.

A single tool

We wanted a single tool to provide central governance of the entire ITSM landscape and clear management information. With traditional IT suppliers that would have entailed a complex project with high costs and long lead times. But not with Fruition Partners, whom we got to know through our business contacts. By replacing our existing tool with the ServiceNow SaaS solution, we could improve our service and significantly cut our monthly costs. Within a month we had made up our mind: that was what we would do. And I was frankly amazed by the speed and the low cost at which they got everything up and running.

Well within budget

Within three months our Change Management, Release Management and Configuration Management were running perfectly. Everything is fully automated, so the quality is now also much higher. What’s more, we’ve made significant savings on our annual costs. And then at the end of the project I was really pleased to learn there was a budget surplus left over. That came as a great relief. ServiceNow is also a smart cloud solution, in which Fruition Partners has embedded the ITIL processes very effectively. We’re tackling it on an agile basis, i.e. step by step. Phase 1 has been completed and we’re about to start on Incident Management, Problem Management, Capacity Management and Portfolio Management. We’ll soon have everything integrated in a single tool so we can monitor all ITSM processes down to the finest detail in our control room. That means we’ll have complete control and can react quickly and appropriately to all conceivable events.

Culture fit

Fruition Partners did a first-class job. We also had a good culture fit, which is important in this kind of project. We rolled up our sleeves and got the job done together, organising the agile sprint sessions from the Fruition Partners office in Rijswijk to keep the focus on delivery. It was almost as if the Robeco teams and Fruition Partners were competing to get the job done. A good atmosphere and a shared objective prove time and again to be an important success factor.”

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[Case study Fruition Partners]