What would your IT Director and CIO say if you ran into them in the elevator and asked them "What would you say if I could save the company a half a million dollars a year?" 

Not too long ago one of the projects I was managing was a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) project.  We looked for the highest costs for desktop support and focused in on those areas only, so we left out things like training for end users, software and hardware procurement, just because the savings were not that great and we wanted to get some big scores on the project and then come back around in additional phases to reengineer the smaller costs savings.  So the three areas we focused on were the desktop setup process, software installation, and power management.  As usual the project had to be approved by the COO, CIO, IT Director, so on.  When I did my first ROI calculations on these three areas I was shocked by what I found, at first I thought my math had to be wrong, I must have multiplied when I really should have subtracted or something like that, so I ran over the formulas in Excel again and got the same results, then I took a little break thinking I was too focused and needed to walk away and come back for round three.  When I came back for round three I did find an error, but it actually only made the figures bigger!  I took this information, put it together into a few PowerPoint slides, called up my IT Director, told him I was on my way up and wanted to show him some numbers.  I closed my laptop lid and off I went.  We spent about fifteen minutes discussing the slides, he spent some time on his old solar calculator and said he was amazed.  Typically what would happen at this point was it would go through a cycle of approval taking weeks or months before it was approved or denied, but he took my slides to the COO that night and the project budget was approved just by him without even going to committee. 

So what were my numbers you ask?  They were the RIO numbers on the money we would save by implementing power savings on all the desktops and estimates on salary savings for implementing OSD, and a self service portal for software delivery to make the computer imaging process completely hands off. 

Now on to the calculations and we will start with power savings because it is the most complicated math but also the biggest savings!

As you can see from the image above, with 10k PC's and monitors we get a savings of a half a million dollars!!!  These are very modest estimates and the EPA gets it data based on averages.  So back to the first question, what would your manager say if you could save the company a half a million dollars? 

And we are not even done, that is just the savings from power state.  We still have the OSD deployment and self service portal for software deployments.  During my data gathering I found that based on support costs software installation was the second most costly desktop cost, I ended up building a "shopping" site in ASP using ADO direct calls to the SMS db, and launching a stored procedure that would essentially put the users computer into a collection that had an ad for the appropriate software, it was pretty straight forward and there wasn't a whole lot to it, it was meant strictly for the desktop support team to choose app's to install on a freshly imaged computer, the idea being that they would kick off the BDD process, select the right app's for the user and be able to walk away, do other tasks, and come back a few hours later and be done!  It worked well too and unfortunately I can't really share the data on that because it was internal data to the company and there isn't an RIO calculator for these types of savings.  But lets say that the cost of the entire project was $12,000 and my RIO was less than 30 days!  Don't believe me?  Take the tech's time, say six hours, and then multiply that times the tech's pay, say $35 with benefits included, and then times that times the number of PC's you reimage or setup each year, lets say 1200, that gets you a cost of $252,000 or a quarter of a million dollars each year.  But that doesn't include the normal one off software request you get all year long, lets say that happens 15 times a week, then we need to figure out the costs of two employees time, the tech and the end user.  Lets make this easy and say it takes one hour or two hours for both the employee and the tech, so $70 each time, 15 times a week, and 52 weeks in the year...that's another $54,600.  So about $300,000 a year, now there are several soft costs that are not included just to keep this simple, if we add in things like the people involved in the approval process the costs go mush higher, not to mention the time the users have to put off work waiting for the app to get installed. Now lets reduce the desktop deployment time from six hours to two, and lets reduce the software installs to 30 minutes instead of 120, and we get desktop deployment down from $250k to $84k that is a savings of $166,000 per year, and for the software installs we go from $54k to $13,650 or a savings of $40k which gets us to about an additional $200,000 in savings per year. 

So if you are keeping track we are at about $700,000 savings per year!  So now ask your manager/IT Director/CIO/COO "What would you say if I could save the company $700,000 a year?" 

And in reality you can get even more out of this with the 1E NightWatchman tool, SMSWakeup, and Shopping because they do it better than I did and there is much more to their tools.  If you want more information on these tools shoot me an email and I can get it for you or even setup a demo to see the tools!

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | System Engineer | 1E Inc.

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I Recommend These Books!
SMS 2003 Administrator's Reference: Systems Management Server 2003 -  SMS 2003 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach  -  Microsoft SMS Installer (Book/CD-ROM package)  -  Pro SMS 2003  -  Professional MOM 2005, SMS 2003, and WSUS  -  Start to Finish Guide to Distributing Software With Systems Management Server 2003  -  Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 - Administrator's Companion

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