One Stop shop reclaims IT control

Convenience retailer cuts costs by 40 per cent taking finance IT back in-house

Convenience store chain One Stop has saved 40 per cent on the cost of owning, running and maintaining a financial IT system by taking it back in-house.

The Tesco-owned company insourced the system in December at the end of a five-year contract with a third-party outsourcer that provided hosting, managing and maintenance services.

David Anderson, One Stop information systems and supply chain director, says changes to the business during the contract meant it became too expensive to update the financial system from specialist vendor CedarOpenAccounts via the outsourcer.

‘The cost of running the contract, and the fact that the hosting environment was a particularly difficult one in which to change things, led us to bring the systems back in-house,’ he said.

‘We had never upgraded before, because of the cost and complexity of the process. So when we moved the systems over last year we had to jump three versions to get up to date.’

The company has further reduced the cost of running the system by moving to an easier-to-maintain operating system and hardware infrastructure.

‘We’ve cut costs by moving to a cheaper, commoditised in-house infrastructure. Cedar manages the application support remotely, and another third party manages the Oracle database on which it runs as we don’t have that expertise in-house,’ said Anderson.

‘We didn’t think we could make savings of the magnitude that we have, but we have.’