By: Abhishek Jain, Director, Strategy Office, LTIMindtree

Are you looking for holistic vendor transition solutions for your enterprise? This blog discusses the three steps for building a fail-safe vendor transition solution.

Introduction

Every day, millions of dollars in deals get signed between outsourcing organizations and vendors; every deal presents an opportunity to improve future operations. However, the time gap between deal sign-off and commencing future operations with a new vendor is always full of uncertainty and anxiety. This time gap, called transition, is when a change of hands occurs between an outsourcing organization or an incumbent vendor to a new vendor.

For a new vendor, every transition execution requires a lot of readiness to understand the organization’s outsourcing requirement and convert it into a customized solution. This blog attempts to present the construction of a customized transition solution for creating a noiseless and swift migration of IT services that can mitigate uncertainty and anxiety for both parties by studying crucial nuances and adopting data science and AI.

Effective Vendor Transition Solution by LTIMindtree

Good transitions are like a mystery; when solved with utmost readiness, they delight the organizations and vendors, and when not, they make everyone suffer in the journey. Every organization and vendor goes through this transition journey during an outsourcing initiative, and their experience depends on the quality of the transition solution.

During the proposal stage, prospective vendors create transition solutions based on the assumptions and limited information made available by the outsourcing organizations. Still, there are many elements of an operating environment that vendors are not aware of, which brings an element of mystery to the entire transition journey.

To demystify this transition journey, we at LTIMindtree Transition practice work on multiple transition solutions that appreciates the critical nuances of organizations and enables noiseless and rapid transition.

Step 1 – Understand the big picture while developing a vendor transition solution

To construct a well-defined transition solution, it’s essential to understand the big picture because every outsourcing initiative is a product of the future aspirations of an organization. At LTIMindtree, we perform primary and secondary research on the organization’s line of business. It helps us understand their business vision, mission, growth charter, and financial performance.

Information collected from this research helps to prioritize the transition waves and integration of transformation initiatives that are more attuned to CXO’s vision.

Case in point: Our primary and secondary research on a veterinarian hospital based in the USA revealed that their business vision primarily focuses on the quality and efficiency of services. Thus, it helped us design a transition strategy that balances the speed with additional quality tollgates for every phase; it achieved an SLA of 99.7% within four weeks of go-live for a 16-week transition of 100+FTEs.

Step 2 – Organization’s Intent for Outsourcing Initiative

After understanding the vision of the outsourcing organization, we start building a deeper understanding of the overall intent and objective behind the outsourcing initiative. We study available data/documents to gain insight into the organization’s environment, issues, and challenges at every operational level.

We build a communication channel with the organization that details upon operating environment of scope in the discussion. This exercise helps analyze and appreciate nuances, relevant data, technical limitations, and core issues faced by organizations and their end customer on a day-to-day basis.

The information collected in this exercise helps create a data -based picture of the overall operating environment, inefficiencies, and opportunities that can be prioritized and addressed during transition execution.

Case in point: For a large US-based manufacturing organization, we created a data-based current state application portfolio and identified unique improvement levers for user experience, ticket elimination, automation potential, and transition complexity across six LOBs (lines of business), and created transition solution enablers that focused on the implementation of self-service tools, MTTR reduction, and workload elimination initiatives during the transition period.

Step 3 – Preparing for execution excellence through Data Science and AI

Every transition plan is devised by analyzing factors like application complexity, criticality, size, and stability. These factors affect all the essential facets of transition, i.e., people, process, technology, and infrastructure.

Large and complex transitions tend to ‘assume’ controllable factors without mitigating the inherent risk. These factors can affect overall readiness and timelines and severely impact the transition plan.

To mitigate these inherent risks, we apply data science and AI as a comprehensive process that involves pre-processing and analyzing application data supplied by organizations, correlating the data provided with the historical transition performance of similar technology/applications, and thus predicting the transition timelines.

Transition Ease Index (TEI), an LTIMindtree tool that leverages data science and AI and helps to construct the necessary timelines and checkpoints for planning, knowledge transfer, and stabilization phase by considering geo level, technology level complexities, and people-related factors, thereby ensuring all the inherent risks are covered and mitigated during the solution stage.

Case in point: A Fortune 100 Europe-based health science organization was struggling to create an efficient transition strategy for 1800+ applications. LTIMindtree performed due diligence on all 1800+ applications and created a data model by understanding complexity, criticality, size, stability, and end-user tickets data. After applying the TEI algorithm, the AI engine created a transition plan that helped achieve timelines of 26 weeks with 99.3% SLA in the stabilization phase..

Conclusion:
Every outsourcing requirement is unique; it reflects an organization’s vision. A well-researched study of an organization’s business and its outsourcing objective and data-driven analytics of its application portfolio helps build an impactful transition solution.