Case Study: Unilever Achieves IT Cost Transparency and Millions in Savings with Apptio

Unilever saves millions in 15 months with Apptio

Unilever, a major global consumer goods company, faced a challenge in managing its sprawling IT infrastructure. Its centralized IT spending model lacked transparency and accountability, making it difficult to align costs with business value and recover expenses from its internal business units. To address this, Unilever turned to vendor Apptio and adopted its Technology Business Management (TBM) framework to drive cost transparency and transform its IT financial management.

The solution implemented with Apptio involved moving to a platform-based IT model with accurate chargeback capabilities. This was enabled by cleaning up configuration data and using Apptio to provide detailed insights into the total cost of ownership for IT services and applications. The results were substantial: within 15 months, Unilever increased cost visibility from 20% to 80%, eliminated €15 million in costs from a single pilot, reduced its IT services portfolio from 4,000 to 2,000, and identified a further €50 million in potential savings from data center consolidation. Apptio was crucial in providing the data needed to accelerate cloud migration and optimize spending.

Unilever