Hitachi Energy: designing, building and implementing a new IT organisation

The Challenge

Our client, Hitachi Energy, is a global technology leader, committed to advancing a sustainable energy future for all. Formerly the Power Grids division from ABB that was divested to Hitachi Group, our client serves customers in the utility, industry and infrastructure sectors with innovative solutions and services. As part of that divestment and company establishment, our team was brought in to support the IT separation and build of a new independent IT organisation. Throughout this 3-year strategic partnership, we delivered several projects from strategy through to execution.

Hitachi Energy faced the overarching challenge of building a global network of IT environments for their business. There were several sub-challenges within the programme, some that were identified from the outset, and others arising along the way.

The key challenges included having to exit all TSAs within a 3-year period, establishing and setting up a brand-new IT organisation and sourcing and selecting a strategic partner for the build and set up of the new organisation. Further, our teams had to execute at pace within a challenging environment. This meant operating the programme remotely during COVID-19, navigating a complex procurement market, such as facing global semi-conductor shortages, and tackling a host of unique challenges that required an innovative approach to problem-solving.

The Approach

The 3-year strategic partnership began with the sourcing and selection of an IT outsourcing partner to support the build and set up of the new IT organisation. This included implementing a collaborative solutions approach to support design, vendor selection, and contract negotiations – all done rapidly given timelines and remotely given COVID-19.

Understanding the unique set-up within Hitachi Energy, our experts were best-positioned to support the build of multiple discrete IT functions. This included an operational vendor management function, a business IT environment team, amongst others mobilised to resolve the TSA exit programme. The largest team that we set up and ran was the country deployment office (CDO). The CDO oversaw the exit of all IT TSAs across over 80 countries, 360 sites, and around 40,000 employees.

This was a programme management and delivery organisation that was originally led by a small, high impact team of our consultants. As part of the CDO, we oversaw the delivery of the TSA program across all IT workstreams, covering IT infrastructure, cloud computing, business apps, supporting services, collaboration, information security, service integration, connectivity and associated workstreams such as procurement. The scale and complexity of the program scope was significant, covering:

• • 40k PC / laptops devices
  • 10k mobile devices
  • 4k printer devices
  • 4k applications
  • 33k net new assets
  • 350+ servers
  • 5k virtual machines
  • 10k apps rationalised to >1000

In addition, our specialists helped oversee an extended team of over 300 third party contractors and Hitachi Energy employees. Throughout that process, our team supported on the delivery and exit of IT TSA exit services through discovery, planning, and the termination of the underlying agreements. We provided a rapid intervention capability, fixing issues as they arose with our highly experienced IT M&A team. Our experts also developed an approach to the managed factory and business-owned IT that was initially not in scope but required addressing before the IT TSA exit deadline. Throughout our partnership, we supported the IT leadership with monitoring and controlling the execution of the plan, culminating in an on-time and to-budget project completion. Finally, we provided our client with strategic advice when managing third-party vendors, including the turnaround of poor performing services.

The Impact

Our experts delivered the programme on time and to budget for our client, successfully exiting all TSAs and transitioning all services into Hitachi Energy. In addition, we completed the early terminations of TSAs, minimised operational impact and established a new IT function that is agile, innovative and fit for the future.

As a result, we’re continuing to support Hitachi Energy with several ongoing strategic initiatives.