Thank you.
We do have a wealth of opportunity when it comes to economies of scale. For example, when we inherited—of course, we inherited people, equipment, and contracts, etc.—we also inherited projects. When we started looking at these projects last winter, we estimated that we had inherited 750 projects “in flight” across the 43 departments. Those projects are already under way. They've been approved by the individual departments.
What we found in going through those projects is that there were several places where they might have five video conferencing projects all going on at the same time, with five different suppliers, five different ways of going about it, and five project management teams. We've been able to consolidate some of those projects. We've cancelled some. We've ended some. That's one example.
This is another very practical example. One department had a data centre in Regina that was nearing the end of its life, and it was part of their plan to build a new data centre on a floor of an office building in Regina. We found that another department in Regina had space in a different data centre, so we were able to not do that build there.
Earlier I mentioned CommVault data centre services, with which we have a contract. We've consolidated and will be saving $15 million and avoiding costs of $15 million over the next three years.
As I said, our back office received a transfer from departments of 13% to set up our internal services. We are aiming for internal services of no more than 11%, so we're just slashing 2% off the top, because we figure that we are able to use common business processes, and we're able to go on financial systems and human resource systems that other departments have put in place, because we believe in doing things that way. As well, we can leverage technology and look at self-serve kinds of solutions for our employees going forward.
Those are examples, but we have had a lot of them. We had a video conferencing system that Agriculture Canada had in place that was one of the better ones among all of the departments, and we were able to bring four other departments onto that same video conferencing system instead of having them develop their own.
That has permitted, among other things, service quality, which is part of this as well. Passport Canada, as a result of being able to use Agriculture Canada's video conferencing, can now video conference with its regional offices, which it couldn't do before.
Those are just some examples.