The challenge
A PE-backed agricultural parts distributor was partway through an SAP rollout that was drifting. There was no program management office, no ticketing system and no project management tools. Legacy on-premise servers carried security and compliance risk the internal team couldn’t fix.
The business ran 29 separate ecommerce websites, IT spending wasn’t consolidated, and its PCI status (SAQ-D, the most demanding level) cost six figures a year in audit work.
Our approach
We placed an interim CIO who set up the program management office that stabilized the SAP rollout, bringing issues, tasks and resources into one place for the first time. Alongside it, we brought in IT governance, a ticketing system, vendor management and spend controls.
We built a data warehouse with Power BI reporting connected to SAP, replacing static PDF reports, and put in a security program with policies, vulnerability scanning and vendor risk reviews. We cut the company’s PCI scope from SAQ-D to SAQ-A, moved its servers and ecommerce sites to Azure, rolled out Microsoft 365 email across five brands, standardized hardware buying through a national supplier and ran a competitive selection for security event monitoring.
The outcome
About $1.09M in savings were identified and set in motion, including $350K a year in PCI audit cost, $320K from the security monitoring selection and an estimated $200K from consolidating 29 websites into five.
The SAP program is back under control, and IT runs on proper tools, governance and spend controls instead of ad hoc fixes.
a year in recurring PCI audit cost removed
ecommerce websites
saved on hardware through standard procurement
