“Abraxio has changed our lives! Thanks to its simplicity, the tool provides a global view of the IT department’s budget in just a few clicks.”

The CIO Office is a cross-functional unit of the SAUR Group IT Department, reporting directly to the Group CIO. We are involved in four main areas: project portfolio management (PPM), governance and operational model, financial management, and change management and communication.
Our main missions are to support IT Department staff through the various changes, to structure and formalize processes, and to communicate/share information.
The CIO Office is the CIO’s point of contact, supporting the transformations he wishes to carry out, setting the framework and structuring, not forgetting continuous improvement.
Our position is central and seen as a facilitator, a pivot between the various IT and business departments. Our interactions are diverse, and do not stop at the boundaries of the IT Department:

• With the professions, through the governance system put in place.
• With the Group Communications Department, by acting as their liaison with the IT Department
• With strategy management to ensure that our IT strategy is aligned with the Group’s overall strategy
• With finance to implement rules, processes and budget monitoring

To be a player in the transformation process, you have to know how to transform yourself. For an IT department like ours, in charge of an ambitious digital transformation plan, it was essential to gain in steering maturity and facilitate consolidation.

This was a global approach, and involved rethinking our processes and responsibilities, notably through the RACI to clarify everyone’s roles and expectations. We also wanted to obtain a clear, consolidated view of the IT Department’s budgets and project management.

This approach coincided with my arrival at SAUR. The initial objective was to equip the budget process. To facilitate monitoring and projections, we wanted to have a global and reliable vision of the budget (committed, consumed and remaining to be done) with quality, harmonized and secure data, without fearing the losses, overwriting and limitations inherent in Excel. To illustrate, before Abraxio, it was almost impossible to consolidate a coherent, high-quality budget landing.

We soon decided to go beyond financial management andfully exploit Abraxio’s “all-in-one” advantages by integrating project management and time recording. This enabled us to replace an existing PPM tool, under-utilized and poorly used due to its complexity, with a solution better suited to our maturity. We wanted to avoid exhausting ourselves trying to get the old tool up and running, despite the reluctance of users. To do this, we preferred to start from scratch with Abraxio, reworking processes and coaching teams to encourage adoption.

Implementation took place in two stages, with clearly defined milestones.

Our primary need was to develop budget management tools. This first phase ran from November 2022 to February 2023. Taking a step back, this^1st deployment was rapid despite our previous operation, which was essentially based on Excel and exclusively in the hands of Finance. We totally transformed this way of working by reversing responsibilities. From now on, each IS director is responsible for his or her own budget and consumption.

This project involved structuring and transferring data from our current financial year (budgets, projects, users, analytical axes, timesheets). To achieve this, we worked closely with Abraxio and an external partner, who helped us redesign our processes.

Since February 2023, we no longer manage our budget in Excel. We operate exclusively in Abraxio, whether for budget design (for which each manager is responsible for his or her own area), for our quarterly budget reviews, or for tracking our consumables and unfinished business.

In a second phase, between April – the^1st framing – and July 2023, we set up time recording and project management. To give you an idea, we manage around 200 projects and a hundred activities in Abraxio, divided into several portfolios.

For this second phase, we also moved fast. Our first flash reports were operational by September 2023, as were the first project portfolio reviews. During this phase, we managed the deployment internally: data transfer, training and user guides.

Culturally, this was a big change for our employees and project managers. The old tool, because of its complexity, was only used for time recording. With Abraxio, because the tool is user-friendly, really simple and accessible, we can go much further in using the solution, and have it accepted as a real communication tool, usable directly in committees.

This has enabled us to reach a real stage of maturity in project management.

This is true for any project, but change management is essential. The implementation of Abraxio represented a real challenge: beyond the adoption of the tool, other transformations were at stake: a complete overhaul of processes, governance, new responsibilities to be assumed by certain players…

In particular, we had to convince the CIO to make Abraxio a tool FOR THE CIO, not a financial tool.

The change was also significant for Finance. They now have an overall view of the IT Department’s budget, but they are no longer its managers, nor do they have the power to modify it as they used to. We supported them and acculturated them to these new practices.

To get all employees on board, we have organized Abraxio Cafés, for example: Q&A sessions to answer questions and share what’s new on the platform.

Today, all IT Department staff based in France and nearshore use Abraxio, a total of 200 users. We’ve achieved our initial objectives, but there’s always room for improvement, maturity and efficiency.

Our next ambitions are to study the possibility of integrating the other BUs to have a global “Group ISD” vision and the integration of our 2nd offshoring partner representing around 80 FTEs for better management of time spent. New challenges ahead!

We also want to enrich project reporting, and know that Abraxio will continue to evolve to meet these needs.

The quest for optimization and simplification continues! We’ve seen it this year: our 2025 budget looks set to be even simpler to manage than our 2024 budget, both in terms of data and platform use. Our aim is to do even better the following year!