Founded in 1927 in the city of Gothenburg, as a spin-off from the roller ball bearing maker SKF, Volvo sold 426,000 Volvos in 1999 when Volvo Group sold Volvo Car Corporation to Ford Motor Company  The bulk of the cars manufactured each year are primarily built in Sweden and Belgium, but the company also builds cars in Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, and China.

Project Summary

Established a pan-European IT strategy. The strategy employed outsourcing to a central site utility utilizing best-of-breed applications from the national sales companies.

Background

Volvo was operated in four divisions: Scandinavia, Europe, North America and Australasia.  Volvo Cars (Europe) Marketing, was being repositioned in Brussels to increase its' role in overseeing the operations in the European division.  VCEM was aware that within Europe, IT was consuming nearly 5% of gross revenues and wanted to find how to reduce it to industry norms of 2 – 3%, or even to Volvo NA norms of below 2%.

Requirement

Review IT operations in the country Volvo operations in Europe and report areas of expenditures outside targets.

Project After Discovery

In each country in Europe there was an autonomous Volvo Cars company conducting   business.  Each had an IT department.  Each IT department had the same application set, running on AS400s.  The applications were locally developed or acquired and had a full set of development and support staff.

Recommended an IT strategy for a future IT state that would bring costs in line with targets.

Approach

• Conducted site visits at each of twelve country Volvo Cars operations to review budgets, projects underway, the state of operations, management processes, infrastructure and applications.  Prepared a report of findings and a presentation.  Presented findings to a pan-European meeting of country managers.
• Developed an application architecture and application inventory of each of the sales company IT configurations. Identified “best-of-breed” of each application type, so develop a single architecture.
• Recommended centralization of IT to a specialist operator of IT services. Within the Volvo Group, a division, Volvo Data had consolidated all mainframe infrastructure and operations in Sweden. They were successfully approached to determine their interest and ability to establish and operate a central AS400 facility in Brussels.
• Developed a migration plan from all European country operations to the new facility.