Background
Evri, formally Hermes UK, is the biggest dedicated parcel delivery company in the UK. Offering 7-day solutions and successfully delivering over 400 million parcels a year working on behalf of 80% of the UK’s top retail brands. The company has delivered double-digit growth for the past 7 years.
In Nov 2020, a Private Equity (PE) investment took a majority stake in the business. This investment resulted in a “Carve-Out” from Evri creating an independent company with sharper strategic focus, accelerating growth and driving efficiency.
To enable the carve out, Evri executed a “lift and shift” from the Evri data centres to public cloud. Some refactoring was considered; however, the primary focus was to exit the Evri data centres at pace in support of the investment. As a result, the value creation plan required cloud cost reduction and more efficient scaling as the business grows.
Client:
Logistic Company
Sector:
Logistics & Financial
Services
Size:
900 users with business critical applications
Challenges
- Evri conducted conduct a rapid ”Lift & Shift” to AWS as part of the carve out resulting in pragmatic decisions that traded efficiency for velocity.
- The value creation plan recognised these choices and required an urgent need to optimise the estate to and reduces costs whilst providing a stable base to support business growth efficiently.
- As the business grows the AWS estate must scale at a lower rate than business volumes and revenue, making IT margin accretive and the public cloud an enabler of business.
Quick Wins
Thebes Group was asked to conduct an initial, rapid discovery over 2 weeks to identify where to eliminate waste and optimise the AWS estate.
This led to a further 12-week engagement using our ATAITM Framework (which brings together the best of breed practices from FinOps & Technology Business Management) and deploying cloud management tooling.
A comprehensive plan was formed in 4 weeks and was then successfully delivered rapidly over an 8-week period by our practitioners & Evri staff.
Key to the success of the engagement, was our team forming trusted and collaborative relationships at all levels of the business and with the PE investor. At a tactical level, we worked with Evri staff to ensure they were trained, enabled and empowered to deliver the savings.
Key Results
22% Reduction in AWS Spend
Established FinOps Capability
Achieved Cost Transparency of Products & Services
Outcome
The engagement delivered the following benefits:
- Cost Reduction of the AWS estate by 22% (c.£900k), materially contributing to a wider value creation plan.
- Achieved cost transparency of AWS cloud spend and identified the unit economics of products & services to measure business growth.
- Supported Evri in establishing its own FinOps capability to actively manage its estate for the future on a cost perspective.
Additionally, helped Evri to accelerate remediation of significant portions of technical debt in its AWS architecture which simplified the environment, improved legacy solutions and avoided additional costs.
