Johannesburg, 25 Jun 2019
Founded in 1941, PPS has grown to support 200 000 members and employ over 1 200 people. Over the past 18 months, the company has undertaken a successful digital transformation drive to rebuild its legacy enterprise platforms and implement a host of tech innovations. PPS’s latest implementation has harnessed SysTrack, a digital experience monitoring solution, to improve employees’ user experience and achieve large IT cost savings, particularly when it comes to software licensing.
“As the company and its infrastructure has expanded, key challenges have included making informed IT procurement decisions, ‘right-sizing’ investments in software licences, and fixing issues that negatively affect employee productivity,” says Avsharn Bachoo, chief technology officer at PPS.
“Quite often, businesses simply do not have the analytics to make decisions such as, ‘How many and which types of licences should we be purchasing?’ or ‘What tech specifications should our new laptops have?’ SysTrack has helped us to answer all these questions and to simultaneously optimise costs.”
Initially, PPS considered using SysTrack because it wanted a tool to help it make informed decisions about procurement. Routine practice was to buy licences for office administration tools for all employees.
“We did not actually know how many employees needed what software, and therefore whether it was necessary to provide licences to everyone across the board,” explains Teddy Thembe, senior manager of IT operations at PPS.
Because IT teams often lack the tools to perform analytics on actual usage and need, managers like Thembe tend to err on the side of caution and over-provide, usually resulting in overspending. Using SysTrack, however, PPS could determine exactly how many software licences its employees required.
“We have substantially reduced our licensing costs,” continues Thembe. “Once we had identified those savings, we started to look at other areas where SysTrack could help optimise our environment, including for endpoint migrations and overall digital experience monitoring.”
When it comes to the latter, after harnessing SysTrack to find the root cause of call centre users’ IT problems, PPS immediately started seeing an improvement in end-user experience. “We could determine if users were just having a bad day, or were genuinely having issues that we could fix, which we then did,” says Thembe.
When it came to monitoring the company's existing server infrastructure, PPS also quickly started using SysTrack. “It has been a great experience,” Thembe says. “SysTrack has made my life easier because I don’t have to be a Linux guru to monitor our Linux servers.”
PPS's other recent tech projects include using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create a new platform that provides members with personalised services such as product recommendations.
PPS is also among the first companies in the world to move its access management and authentication processes from an on-premises device using Docker to the cloud-based Kubernetes container orchestration system. It is also the first company in SA to have implemented Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to deliver apps and desktops to its employees from a data centre in the Google Cloud.
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PPS
Founded in 1941, PPS is the largest mutual financial services company in South Africa. The 78year-old insurance business, migrated their enterprise platform to Google Cloud in under nine months, completely transforming the company while continuing to be an innovative leading South African insurance brand. PPS has more than 200 000 members who enjoy access to a comprehensive suite of financial and healthcare products that are tailored to meet the needs of graduate professionals. PPS is the largest South African company of its kind that still embraces an ethos of mutuality, which means that it exists solely for the benefit of its members. Thus, PPS members with qualifying products share in the profits of PPS Insurance via annual allocations.