The European Union has just recommended the use of the IT Cost saving method proposed by LedaMC. Also, the firm will be the Enel Group’s advisor on the efficiency of IT processes for cost optimization.
We spoke with Dácil Castelo, CEO of LedaMC about all these aspects
Given the result of the last tender by the Enel group for its IT Cost efficiency competence centre, of which the UTE led by LedaMC has been the first awarded, we can say that its consulting experience is yielding results in such a year complicated Is it due to the good ROI of your services?
It has not been an easy year for anyone and what concerns us above all is health. After health, what we try is to help our clients make their companies as efficient as possible and they understand, as the Enel group understands, that to reduce costs we must invest in taking care of our efficiency. We always show what we preach, to optimize and maximize the value we deliver to our clients, to help them take care of their IT developments, hence the ROI figure that so far stands at 500% or otherwise, for every euro invested in LedaMC, our clients get between € 9 and € 25.
You have many years of experience in using cost optimization methods in the IT sector, how did you get the news that the European Union is now recommending them in its software development tenders?
Very happy, especially since the step that the European Union has taken is not an isolated event. Since 2006 we have been working on these methods as they allow us to achieve great savings for our clients, as published by Vodafone, Orange or Mapfre; and since then we have seen how more and more countries have been incorporating it into their bidding processes: Brazil, Italy, Mexico, France among others and now the European Union.
We are convinced that they can be an advantage for the European Union, as well as for any company that wants to be more competitive in a scenario of uncertainty such as the one we are currently experiencing.
How does the European Union apply these methods to save IT costs? In your experience, does it differ in any way from how your clients apply it in supplier management?
It applies it quite broadly to get the most out of it, and we can say that it collects many of the best practices in the industry that I will briefly show below.
We were one of the first companies to use product measurement to optimize the costs of agile developments for our clients and that is one of the points that the European Union now recommends. They prescribe it both in the budgeting of developments and in determining the final cost of the project, trying to eliminate the uncertainties inherent to these environments.
Another of the fields in which we were pioneers, and we are glad that the European Union is following in our footsteps, is optimizing the cost of poor quality. Through function points (software product measurement), the test ware effort required for a software development project can be calculated. Is there a better way than the functionality itself to test to determine the effort required to carry it out? By combining different parameters, we can normalize the values to put our developments in context. Quality, delivery time, cost per function point and effort give us a 360 view of how our developments are to make important business decisions. We can even compare them to what the market is doing since function points are a standard measure.
Other somewhat more common applications of obtaining advantages from the function point that both the EU and our clients adopt are: establishing a supplier ranking to see which supplier is the optimal one to carry out a specific development (taking into account the technology, methodology, etc.) and as mentioned above, focus on the delivered product when hiring a development instead of just taking into account the rates of the different providers. This value of the delivered product, which is based on a standard measurement, can be compared with the market and thus obtain more objective and transparent budgets.