Case Study
Sasol drives environmentally aware growth via $34M cost savings
At A Glance
Industry-leading South African petrochemical business
Location: South Africa
Employees: 30,000
Products: Snow Spend Optimizer for End User Computing, SaaS, and Datacenter; Snow Productivity Optimizer, Snow Risk Monitor, and Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software
Featured Results
$34 million in savings and cost avoidance
30 countries managed from a single location
23,000 devices monitored and managed
The Challenge
Misaligned regional policies undermine efficiency optimization
In recent years, industrial companies have focused much more on sustainability. Take Sasol, for example. This leading petrochemical business in South Africa transformed its operations to ensure it acts responsibly toward the environment while still delivering maximum value to stakeholders.
According to Cobie Nel, senior license and asset management specialist, sustainability is a major driver for Sasol solutions that will contribute to a thriving planet. “We enhanced our efforts to streamline the business and focus on areas where we believe there are good growth prospects with low risk and lower-carbon intensity.”
Knowing that operational efficiency reduces waste, cuts carbon emissions and enables environmentally aware growth, the Sasol team looked at every area of its business, including its very large IT estate, to identify opportunities for efficiency optimization.
They found a complicated situation in which each of the operating regions had different policies, processes and procedures that were not aligned to an ISO standard. Sasol Information Management had a strategic objective to reduce the operational complexity by integrating management of the inventories and configuration databases into their operational processes.
Without standardized reporting for its IT systems that support its 34,000 users across 30 countries, they couldn’t get reliable, enterprise-wide data on IT assets, utilization and compliance. “We wanted to improve our IT efficiency, reduce software and hardware costs, and much more,” says Nel. “For example, retiring redundant, under-used and older systems would pay off for sustainability reasons, and offer significant commercial savings.”
By providing visibility of assets and software utilization on a global scale, we could deliver better quality management information more rapidly than before, mitigating business risk and enabling data-driven decisions.
Cobie Nel, senior specialist, license and asset management
The Solution
Centralized processes and key integrations build trust and executive investment
Sasol aimed to control, plan, procure, deploy, track, maintain and retire all its global Sasol software assets from a central location. Clarity and currency of information would provide verified information for license audits and reduce business risk. They would also cut costs simultaneously by identifying and eliminating redundant software.
“Central to the process was gaining executive buy-in,” comments Nel. “By providing visibility of assets and software utilization on a global scale, we could deliver better quality management information more rapidly than before, mitigating business risk and enabling data-driven decisions.”
Sasol operates in a highly regulated industry and across many countries with varying laws and regulations, so their selection criteria had to include the ability to support policies that meet legal requirements in multiple regions. The chosen solution would also need to integrate with existing business operations and cover Sasol’s core SAP® ERP systems and its manufacturing control systems.
To deliver on its enterprise policy, Sasol selected a full suite of solutions, including Snow Spend Optimizer and Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software. These solutions enable comprehensive management capabilities, from software application builds to utilization and licenses. They include operating systems, devices, hardware configurations and much more.
Nel adds, “These solutions enable the team to become the trusted SAM capability within Sasol. For example, we can provide a single source of truth on software license information, users, and utilization. We now deliver highly reliable, scalable secure, and cost-effective SAM, and Sasol uses this data on a continual basis to manage the software asset lifecycle throughout the enterprise.”
The Result
A significant increase in cost and risk avoidance
With the new solutions in place, Nel reports impressive results: “Combined, our enhanced SAM project has delivered cost savings and avoidance that total more than $34 million. We rationalized and validated our licenses with multiple vendors, including Prometheus GWOS, K2, OMADA, AutoDesk, AirWatch, OpenText, Oracle, Acquire Sentinel, Cloudera, VMware, and many more.”
In addition, the team has become a key enabler for the organization, with comprehensive management of the software asset lifecycle, from planning through procurement to retirement. Based on accurate data, the IT team helps manage the corporation’s risk profile too, with significant reductions in contractual risk, reduced financial risk of penalties, and greater information security. At the strategic level, greater operational control also cuts reputational threats.
Additional results included:
- Optimizing the tracking and management of software assets
- Capturing the attributes related to delivering software assets
- Obtaining a holistic view of the software asset portfolio
- Capturing and reporting costs of software assets and related services
- Providing financial and operational insight about the software asset portfolio within Sasol globally
- Cost avoidance by being able to manage software vendor environments more accurately and proactively
- The ability to procure only the licenses needed and to have information readily available to enable reallocation of licenses where needed
Sasol experienced numerous audits over the past 2 years. During a third-party review of Sasol’s Oracle licenses’ compliance status, the new platform identified some potential compliance concerns for which there were the following estimated cost avoidances (only in South Africa):
- Database compliance cost avoidance of $1.3 million
- Middleware compliance cost avoidance of $27.3 million
Nel concludes, “Thanks to these solutions, we provide the business with a highly reliable, scalable, secure and cost-effective SAM service. The team has become a key enabler for the organization, establishing a trusted SAM capability. We deliver a single source of truth for software license information, reducing the risk of non-compliance and optimizing licensing within Sasol.”
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