Asciano slims down IT team after outsourcing

Ports and rail operator Asciano will slim down its shared services division as part of a five-year business improvement plan which will see 500 jobs go across the company by the end of the month.

The reduction in staff is expected to save the company $90 million a year, under an accelerated cost-saving effort which has been doubled to target $300 million in savings by the fiscal year 2016.

The job cuts will come from Asciano’s corporate layer as well as its shared services division - a business unit which previously delivered and managed IT services to the company, prior to its recent decision to outsource its entire IT infrastructure to Fujitsu.

The company declined to detail how many of the 500 job losses would come directly from the shared services division, but said many of the unit's positions had been made redundant as a result of Asciano’s move to the cloud.

“This has meant that infrastructure services that have been provided in house are now in the process of being transitioned to our cloud service provider,” Asciano CIO Kelvin McGrath said in a statement to iTnews.

“In addition, there has been a small reduction in the size of the teams supporting applications, service desk and field support.”

The restructuring of the shared services and corporate divisions will cost the company around $55 million in one-off costs. The redundancies - which will be completed by the end of this month - are expected to cost up to $30 million.

Asciano began efforts to outsource its IT infrastructure in 2011. It opted against also shifting its service desk to Fujitsu, instead choosing to retain those capabilities in house and "shape the customer experience" using internal skills.

Around the same time the ports operator consolidated five regional IT departments into one, upgraded its Oracle PeopleSoft ERP system, standardised on Exchange and Office for email, and merged a number of wide and local area networks.