Rebuilding the system of record behind a 150-country operation
A multi-category consumer goods leader could not answer a basic question with confidence: what do we own, where is it, and what breaks when it fails. VYNQOR rebuilt the configuration foundation and the operating model around it.
When the CMDB is wrong, every downstream decision is a guess.
This organisation operates across more than 150 countries. Its IT estate had grown through acquisition, regional autonomy, and two decades of tactical decisions - leaving a configuration management database that no one trusted and, critically, no one owned.
The consequence was not a technology problem. It was a decision-making problem. Software licence renewals were negotiated without knowing actual consumption. Incidents were triaged without knowing which business service was affected. Audit responses were assembled manually, under time pressure, from sources that contradicted each other.
Licence and maintenance spend committed against unverified consumption data across a 150-country estate.
No reliable service mapping meant incident impact was assessed reactively, after users reported failure.
Audit and regulatory evidence assembled manually, with no defensible chain from asset record to source of truth.
- A disorganised, unreliable CMDB carrying duplicate, outdated and incomplete configuration items.
- No centralised asset management process - governance was inconsistent and interventions were manual.
- No structured event management framework, producing reactive incident handling and extended resolution times.
- Asset, service and operations data owned by different teams with no shared definition of correctness.
How we approached it
The failure was architectural, not operational - so the fix started with ownership and data contracts, not tooling.
Establish a single source of truth
Defined authoritative sources per class of configuration item, then enforced them through reconciliation rules rather than convention. Correctness became a system property, not a team discipline.
Design the governance operating model
Named data owners, defined stewardship responsibilities, and instrumented health metrics so CMDB quality became a measured, reported KPI with executive visibility.
Shift operations from reactive to predictive
Introduced structured event management so infrastructure signals were correlated and actioned before they surfaced as user-reported incidents.
Close the compliance gap by design
Automated critical incident creation and evidence capture so audit readiness became a continuous state rather than a periodic scramble.
The architecture behind the outcome
A layered configuration architecture - authoritative sources feeding a governed reconciliation engine, with service context and automation built on top.
Measured, not estimated.
Metrics we would instrument next to extend value measurement beyond the delivered baseline. These are recommendations, not achieved results.
- Mean time to identify affected business service during a major incident
- Percentage of critical incidents auto-created from correlated events versus user-reported
- Audit evidence preparation effort, measured in person-days per audit cycle
Delivered through VynImpact™
Every VYNQOR engagement runs on the IMPACT methodology, so delivery health is visible continuously rather than reported retrospectively. This programme ran 24 months end to end.
Profiled configuration data quality against authoritative sources and quantified the gap between recorded and actual estate.
Defined which system is authoritative for each class of data, and where reconciliation rules must arbitrate conflict.
Established data ownership, stewardship cadence, and the health metrics that would make quality visible to leadership.
Implemented reconciliation, centralised asset management, and structured event management with automated incident creation.
Transitioned regional teams onto the governed model, replacing local workarounds with the central process.
Ongoing CMDB health scoring and licence position monitoring, reported as a standing operational KPI.
Scope, grouped by discipline
Platform Engineering
- CMDB architecture redesign and class model rationalisation
- Identification & Reconciliation Engine rule design
- Discovery pattern configuration and coverage expansion
Governance
- Data ownership and stewardship model
- CMDB health scoring framework
- Audit evidence automation
Business Process
- Centralised IT asset management process
- Software licence position and true-up process
- Hardware lifecycle and disposal workflow
Automation
- Structured event correlation rules
- Automated critical incident creation
- Compliance gap detection and alerting
Operations
- Business service mapping for critical services
- Operational dashboards for service health
- Regional operating model transition
Client testimonial pending approval. This engagement is available as a named reference on request.
Reference available on requestWhat made the difference
We treated it as a data contract problem
Most CMDB remediation programmes clean data and watch it decay. We fixed source precedence and reconciliation first, so correctness held after we left.
Governance designed before tooling
Named owners and measured health scores meant quality had an accountable home, not just a dashboard nobody read.
Sustained across a 24-month horizon
A 150-country estate cannot be transformed in a sprint. We held architecture discipline across two years and six delivery phases.
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