CLIENT: Year-Up, a MMKT NFP committed to ensuring equitable access to economic opportunity, education, and justice for all young adults—no matter their background, income, or zip code – to close the Opportunity Divide that exists in our country.
ENGAGEMENT: Silver Tree was engaged in October 2019 to reduce IT costs, reduce risks, enhance services (IT infrastructure, desktop engineering, Network Ops. Center (NOC), and various Applications) for IT agility, and free up valuable resources for strategic initiatives to fuel Year Up’s digital transformation.
CHALLENGES: A global pandemic hit, business conditions and scope changed, including:
- Complete transition in 8 weeks, instead of the planned 12 weeks
- Shift to totally remote execution for engagement/ongoing managed services
- Support 100% remote client workforce
- Additional 20% labor cost reduction
ACTION: Implement outsourced Infrastructure, Corporate Applications and Business services, leveraging Silver Tree’s Global Delivery Model for 30 locations and 3500 users.
SILVER NUGGET: Silver Tree’s framework of integrated teams and program management enabled highly effective and agile teams to execute as ONE TEAM which was truly transparent through management dashboards. Resources were quickly trained and IT services executed completely remotely, decreasing costs, and improving the quality-of-service from day one – while still fulfilling Year Up’s mission of closing the Opportunity Divide.
RESULTS:
- 40% reduction in like-for-like cost even with the additional services added due to the need to outsource student support, site operations, application analysis and 3rd party consultants
- Best practices and procedures implemented with significant service improvement realized.
- Year Up deployed thousands of computers to students to continue their remote learning, net new
- Addition of student support to structured service agreement
- Addition of Network Operations Center facilitating proactive management of the environment.
- With cost savings achieved, client was able to expand the scope to include benefits and payroll processing, and Applications Support.
- Improved and complete transparency in service reporting and data that previously didn’t exist
BOTTOM LINE: Silver Tree’s expertise, transparency, and a collective commitment to the strategic value of the relationship enabled Year Up to execute this extremely challenging transformation very successfully.