Image: Toll Group
Transportation and logistics company Toll Group operates a network of 1,200 sites across 50 countries, covering road, rail, sea, air, and warehousing.
Following a number of acquisitions, Toll found itself in a position where it had multiple IT systems that didn't talk to one another and no business directive to stop anyone from purchasing anything IT-related.
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Francoise Russo joined Toll about 18 months ago as the company's CIO, and shortly after Michael Byrne was appointed as Toll's managing director. Both executives entered the organisation with a transformation mandate.
"The company had been changing in any case, but it was amplified when he came in -- a huge supporter of IT," Russo said of Byrne's appointment.
Speaking with ZDNet at Oracle Cloud World in Sydney last week, Russo said she had the approval -- and AU$400 million in spending money -- for her transformation plans in March last year.
"Toll's performance had been declining over a period of time and it had also grown from being a series of acquisitions that had been made over the last 10 years, but not really integrated ... still being managed as a series of small acquisitions," she explained.
"The tipping point was to drive performance up, contemporise ourselves as a modern