Customer case study: Coventry Building Society

Coventry Building Society chooses ITRS to right size and automate capacity planning

Coventry Building Society has grown from a small family-run business to the second largest building society in the UK, with £51bn under management. As the Society undertook digital transformation it was looking to ensure its customers would receive the level of service expected in the digital age.

So, the Society chose ITRS to partner with and assist it on its digital transformation journey, providing the Society with a best-in-class capacity management tool. The challenge Coventry Building Society faced was that, as its data grew, so did the effort it took to keep its old tools functioning.

Every week the capacity management team had to ingest around 180 files, a huge manual task that ate up a lot of valuable time and effort. Nathan Douthwaite, IT Capacity Manager at Coventry Building Society, said: “There were a lot of limitations.”

So, after a move to a hybrid cloud data center environment in 2021, the Society realized it needed a new capacity management solution. “We decided we needed a proper capacity management tool,” said Nathan. “We wanted a golden source of truth.”

Easy choice, easy implementation

Coventry Building Society had a lot of criteria, from dashboarding to the types of data and support levels it needed to manage. It looked at the alternatives on the market and soon realized that few of the other players were suitable.

Except ITRS, said Nathan: “Once we saw ITRS, our minds were made up.” During the POC, Coventry identified costs that could be cut through right-sizing and cloud savings plans. The Society confirmed that ITRS Capacity Planner will provide significant ROI back to the organization.

Using ITRS Capacity Planner, the Society can ensure its level of commitment to the cloud provider is accurate. This enables precise forecasting and optimizing against its savings plan, to avoid costly overspending on cloud resources. Implementation went smoothly, said Nathan, “It was super easy.” He added that communication and support from ITRS were “excellent... brilliant.”

Company description:

Banking and financial services provider Coventry Building Society (the Society) was formed in 1884. Today it is the second largest building society in the UK, serving 1.8m million and assets of more than £51 billion.

Business challenges:

Capacity management system could no longer support growing data
Largely manual ingestion of 180+ files per week into multiple Excel files
Lack of dashboarding – had to review alerts manually, losing valuable time
Too many monitoring tools

ITRS solution:

ITRS Capacity Planner

Business benefits:

Automation of manual reporting reduces MTTR
Single view of hybrid IT estate
Own service view of utilization levels for forecasting
Cost savings via accurate right sizing
Realizing a “golden source of truth” for monitoring data

Benefits seen

By automating the data ingestion, ITRS saved the Society from manual intervention, freeing up Nathan and his team. Plus, “The team is more focused now and can shout about what we are capable of.”

The features Coventry Building Society most appreciated? “Dynamic updates are very important to us, we can track what’s happening by field – data centers, apps. We could not do this in Excel,” said Nathan.

Reporting is also key, he said, for service implementation. “We can have a report of every service the company has, replacing 40% of the Excel files.” Coventry Building Society is excited about ITRS’s vision for the future of Capacity Planner and CCO.

Learn more about ITRS Capacity Planner here.

I really enjoyed working with ITRS, the communication was fantastic. It’s not often you get responses and fixes within minutes. I just want to say, ‘thank you to ITRS.’