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“IBM Apptio was a better fit and more suitable to our processes and objectives. It integrated easily with our existing systems, had an easy-to-understand taxonomy for IT costs and services, and offered continuous planning capability, not just quarterly or annually.”
By adopting IBM Apptio, Jabil modernized its IT financial management (ITFM) operations, achieving faster budgeting and chargeback cycles, an estimated 25 percent productivity gain, improved forecasting accuracy, and stronger financial accountability across its global footprint. IBM Apptio enabled the company to eliminate inefficient manual processes and increase cost visibility, delivering data-driven insights for strategic decision-making. Despite significant growth, divestitures, and organizational changes in the business, Jabil continues to maintain IT spend as a steady percentage of revenue.
Jabil is one of the world’s largest manufacturing solutions providers, with over 100 sites worldwide, 140,000 employees, and more than 35 million square feet of manufacturing space. Operating for 60 years, the company combines global reach with local expertise to offer comprehensive engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing solutions. Jabil goes beyond the traditional role of a manufacturing service provider, serving as a trusted partner to the world’s leading brands across markets like AI cloud data centers, healthcare, robotics, automotive and transportation, warehouse automation, and energy.
Information technology is at the heart of Jabil’s business, and the company invests heavily in IT to ensure the organization can meet market demands. This is something Enton Kane, IT Director at Jabil, knows very well. “My role is focused on IT transformation, value creation, and realization from technology investments,” he said. “To do that, I need accurate, timely financial data for planning, forecasting, and cost management.”
The company’s existing ITFM processes, however, made it challenging to obtain that information and limited its ability to achieve ROI goals.
Jabil’s budgeting, forecasting, and chargeback processes depended on spreadsheets and manual data extraction from HR, procurement, and ERP systems. This made planning cycles slow, error-prone, and heavily dependent on meetings and manual validation. The company’s performance management system also limited IT to a 12-month rolling plan, preventing multi-year planning. Forecast adjustments during the year required off-system spreadsheets because the enterprise planning system was not always open for updates. Variances were difficult to analyze, and finance teams struggled to quickly understand what was driving changes.
Cost center owners had limited visibility to connect data to financial impact, and last‑minute updates were difficult to track consistently. While financial reports were detailed, they were not always intuitive for fast, business‑focused interpretation—highlighting opportunities to improve transparency, version control, accountability, and the way cost insights are shared with business partners.
According to Kane, IT Finance succeeded in reducing costs despite the challenges. But even when they did, they lacked a mechanism to communicate their value. “We were making positive, cost-saving changes,” he said, “but did not have an efficient way to demonstrate our impact.”
Kane knew that with better tools and a more efficient, transparent approach to ITFM, the company could overcome these challenges, make more informed decisions on IT spend, and drive more value for the business.
After reviewing several potential solutions to the company’s ITFM challenges, Jabil selected IBM Apptio. The modern, integrated solution eliminated the need for spreadsheets and long meetings with cost center owners. More importantly, it solved the fundamental problem of cost transparency.
Kane said, “IBM Apptio was a better fit and more suitable to our processes and objectives. It integrated easily with our existing systems, had an easy-to-understand taxonomy for IT costs and services, and offered continuous planning capability, not just quarterly or annual. Our CIO’s initial ask was ‘to create a robust, consumption-based and defendable chargeback process,’ and IBM Apptio had the ability to deliver it.”
Jabil began with gaining IT cost transparency and gradually automated the entire planning and chargeback workflow. Integrations with HR, ERP, IT service management, and enterprise planning systems helped eliminate manual effort. Over time, IBM Apptio became the central platform for IT cost management and multi-year forecasting.
Before implementing IBM Apptio, Jabil relied on spreadsheets for IT chargeback and financial planning, which required extensive manual coordination and reconciliation, slowing down every cycle. After adopting IBM Apptio, the company reduced month-end close by one full day, cut forecast updates from several weeks to under a week, shortened chargeback calculations from days to only less than half day, and increased overall productivity by approximately 25percent.
“Since we started using IBM Apptio, we have been able to deliver our budget and chargeback commitments on time while improving the quality of data and analysis we provide,” said Kane. “And while our services have expanded, we’ve been able to provide these services without increasing headcount.”
Like most organizations, relying on spreadsheets and manual processes caused several challenges for Jabil’s IT finance team. Version control issues often created inconsistencies, cost center owners were unclear about their data, often pushing back on chargeback numbers, and the IT finance team lacked the transparency they needed to justify cost allocations.
IBM Apptio has eliminated these issues. Business units now receive consumption-based, easy-to-understand cost views, and leaders have visibility into variances, budgets, and spending drivers. This increased transparency has strengthened trust between IT, finance, and executive leadership. Increased transparency and access to timely, trusted data have strengthened collaboration and trust across IT, finance, and executive leadership—shifting the focus from data validation to making better, more informed cost management decisions. “All decisions we make now are data-driven,” Kane said. “We have shifted from chasing data to performing meaningful analysis.”
Application limitations and lack of visibility made budget adjustments and multi-year planning a significant challenge for Jabil. With IBM Apptio, however, all forecasting is done within the application—there is no need for manual spreadsheet updates. The company can now update forecasts quickly, create multi-year plans, and adjust spending based on real-time visibility. This enables funds to be reallocated to strategic initiatives, such as new factory startups.
“Using data from IBM Apptio and our chargeback model, we’re able to estimate the IT costs required to support a new factory,” Kane said. “This includes forecasting future ERP system expenses and determining the appropriate data center model, whether cloud-based or on-premises.”
IBM Apptio has given Jabil better insight to make informed decisions about IT spend. Kane said, “Visibility into detailed IT forecasts has allowed us to renegotiate contracts, balance resources between internal and outsourced workers, and shift funding to high-priority, strategic initiatives.”
One example that really stood out, Kane said, happened soon after going live with IBM Apptio. “We were able to renegotiate the contract with a major software vendor,” he said. “By switching users to licenses that better fit their roles, we saved about $1M a year.”
To add additional support for Jabil’s FinOps practice, the company implemented IBM Cloudability as part of its Apptio portfolio. According to Kane, within 12 months of implementation the FinOps team streamlined the collaboration processes with their engineering teams, acted on machine learning-powered optimization recommendations and avoided about $1.8M in costs—money that, without IBM Cloudability, would have been wasted on unnecessary resources.
IBM Apptio and IBM Cloudability have helped Jabil transform IT financial management into a streamlined, transparent, and data-driven discipline. The company reduced cycle times, improved accuracy, enhanced accountability, and enabled better decision-making across business units. With IBM Apptio, Jabil shifted from manual data collection to meaningful analysis, strengthening IT’s strategic role in the business.
According to Kane, Jabil plans to expand automation and deepen its use of IBM Apptio and IBM Cloudability. “We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Apptio,” he said, “and are especially interested to find out more about how we can leverage IBM Apptio and IBM Cloudability for tracking and reporting AI investments and value realization.”
