Superpartners: Excellence in Cost Optimization

Customer

The largest superannuation (retirement investment) administrator in Australia, Superpartners delivers complete administration service solutions, including member and employer administration, trustee services, insurance and risk management, to industry superannuation clients. With 1,500 employees and offices in every capital city, Superpartners administrates over $68 billion for over six million member accounts and half a million employers.

Industry

Business services.

Challenge

Superpartners provides business services in the form of applications to 16 superannuation funds. Services include a suite of secure online services for fund members and employers.

In 2005, the IT organization was responsible for 25 core applications; by 2008, that number had doubled.

Updating and releasing the growing portfolio of applications on a weekly basis was straining the company's IT resources, compromising availability and performance, and degrading the quality of the end user experience. Furthermore, manual application testing and siloed management processes made it difficult to support the company's aim of providing high-value administration services at the lowest possible cost.

Solution

Superpartners implemented HP Quality Center to automate software testing and quality assurance while streamlining end-to-end quality processes. At the same time, the solution helped drive standardized testing practices and a centralized testing infrastructure.

Next, the company turned to HP Business Availability Center to monitor application availability and performance from the end-user's perspective. To optimize return on investment, the IT organization engaged business and end-user stakeholders to better understand business transaction challenges and usability issues. In just a matter of weeks, Superpartners had gained true end-to-end visibility into business transactions and transaction value, all the way to back-end systems and mainframes. Today, Superpartners can pinpoint and rectify incidents quickly and proactively.

Superpartners also uses HP Network Node Manager software, HP SiteScope software, and HP Storage Essentials software.

"Our solutions hold a frontline position in helping clients manage their superannuation business, so it's critical we understand how our applications are performing. HP management software has given us visibility and control across the entire application lifecycle. What's more, it's allowed us to reap significant savings in multiple process areas–from quality assurance to incident management."
- Gary Evans, CIO

Outcomes

• Accrued 58 percent return on investment over three-year period
• Achieved payback on investment in 15 months
• Gained ability to deliver 99.72 percent uptime for all systems for three years running
• Successfully supported 50 million transactions in 2008
• Trimmed "severity one" incidents 65 percent
• Reduced support queues 73 percent
• In 2008, cut emergency changes from 19 to two–an 89 percent reduction
• Since activating SLA breach escalation process in September 2008, reduced incidents 99.3 percent
• Supported a reduction in staff turnaround from 15 percent to six percent in three years

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