The VMS AdaptiveTCO Workbench
An adaptive TCO model for illustrating the company’s real cost structure.
The analysis of an SAP installation with VMS takes into account costs, use, and quality. While the measurement of system-use and technical quality by the VMS DataCollector is automated, costs and performance structures need to be manually prepared for inclusion in a TCO model.
We developed VMS AdaptiveTCO for that task. The model takes into account the ITIL model; however, this model has been specifically adapted and expanded for SAP systems. That means that software and service components can be represented better than with conventional ITIL. Here’s what Ralph Treitz, one of the founders of VMS, says about it:
“The possibilities in structuring IT services using ITIL are very helpful for many of our clients. But as far as managing applications such as SAP is concerned, ITIL still has large gaps. We fill these gaps in order to be able to offer a good, consistent TCO model.”
One essential benefit of the VMS AdaptiveTCO model is that it brings the various cost structures from the VMS customer companies into a unified represented and comparable TCO model.
In “classical” benchmarking, that problem is left to the client, who has to calculate the costs per GB disk, or the costs per SAP applications administrator.
This is not the case with VMS, which records real cost structures. VMS calculates unit costs so that they can be understood, and so that any deviations from best practices can be easily detected and explained. VMS makes the benchmarking process transparent for the client.
This is made possible by the flexibility of the VMS AdaptiveTCO model.
Cost structures differ from IT system to IT system. But even concepts are not really standardized. What does first level support include, for example. And of course, not every company has costs available in itemized form, or in as much detail as one might want. This is where the VMS model makes it possible to work at the level of detail available in each client company.
That’s the second advantage of VMS AdaptiveTCO: costs are gathered in the client’s structures, and not according to an inflexible grid, as happens in conventional processes. However, project-based cooperation makes it possible to determine costs in such a complete form after being recorded, that they are of the best possible quality for analysis, for example, as part of a benchmarking process.