Client Profile

Customer Name: Ferguson plc

Established: 1887

Employees: 30,000+

Sector: Distribution

Ferguson plc is a leading, value-added distributor of plumbing and heating products. Ferguson serves customers in North America, predominantly serving the repair, maintenance, and improvement markets.

At their subsidiary, Ferguson Group Services Limited (FGS), Ferguson is responsible for their PeopleSoft Financials application with users mainly based in the UK, alongside users in Switzerland and North America.

Solution

The IT infrastructure used to host Ferguson’s PeopleSoft Financials application, along with the teams who maintained the environments, existed outside FGS in a larger operating subsidiary that they would be exiting. During the planning to exit this subsidiary, Ferguson recognised the need to find a solution in order to continue using PeopleSoft.

Version 1 delivered a fully managed outsourced solution to Ferguson for running their PeopleSoft environments, replacing their internal infrastructure. The outcome allowed Ferguson to continue working on their PeopleSoft Financials application as they had previously, but without having to host and maintain it themselves. Version 1 also upgraded Ferguson’s PUM image and PeopleTools to the latest update.

Outcomes

The primary benefit is that Ferguson can continue to use PeopleSoft Financials as they did previously.

Following the exit of the operating subsidiary, Ferguson would not have been able to justify the infrastructure or manpower needed to continue hosting and maintaining the application if they had to resource it internally.

From a business perspective, the solution did not change, allowing Ferguson to continue to use the application as they did previously. Without outsourcing the hosting and maintenance, Ferguson would have likely had to move to a new application, with the associated implementation and user transition costs. This type of work has been minimal as the sole change for most users was the hyperlink to follow to sign into the application.

We had already worked with Cedar Consulting (acquired by Version 1 in 2018) many years ago and knew some of the team well from those previous projects. Version 1’s ability to provide both Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and PeopleSoft expertise without having to bring in third parties was a significant benefit. Version 1 was also able to offer us compelling pricing using an onshore/offshore support model. We benchmarked these costs proposed by Version 1 to other third-party providers as part of the selection process.

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