Effective management of IT requests in the group
Customer‘s profile
ENERGOCHEMICA SE is a holding that affiliates major companies in Slovakia from the field of chemical production (Chemko Strážske, Petrochema Dubová, FORTISCHEM, ENERGOCHEMICA TRADING) and from the power industry (Novácka energetika, TP2). It employs over 3,000 employees in Slovakia.
From its headquarters in Bratislava, the company operates the production plants and other operations that are dispersed hundreds of kilometres from the west to the east of the country. The chemical-energy holding’s goal is to become a leader in the field of chlorine chemistry in the countries of the Visegrad Four.
Management summary
The PosAm solution for effective management of IT services propelled the companies of the holding ENERGOCHEMICA from having a mutually uncoordinated process with corresponding inferior quality, effectiveness and control to having a common, standardised and fully automated process and measurable results. The new system provides central record-keeping and monitoring of all requests and the allocation of tasks to the right worker with appropriate skills and so ensures the task is done on time and to a high standard of quality. What’s more, the management now have a quality tool for the checking, evaluation and strategic management of IT services.
Initial status
Each of the companies that ENERGOCHEMICA affiliated to the holding structure resolved IT requests separately, in a complicated and ineffective way. Processes were not clearly defined, requests came in disorganised, there was a lack of clear records, it wasn’t possible to manage or measure the progress and outcome of service interventions. The companies not only lacked request records, but also reporting on performed operational activities. This state of affairs made it impossible to manage personnel capacities effectively (with no option to utilise and share experts) and at the same provided no assurance of an appropriate level of checks, quality, transparency and cost-effectiveness.
Goals and requirements
The aim of the companies was to amalgamate, optimise and simplify IT support and operation throughout the holding structure. The expectations focused chiefly on the introduction and standardisation of IT support process management, quality application support for these processes, including a services catalogue and the creation of a Single Point of Contact for reporting and managing requests. From the perspective of managing resources, the system was to help identify problematic equipment and improve control and the option to evaluate employees and external sub-contractors in terms of capacity usage and effectiveness. The outcome of the changes was to establish optimised IT services across the whole holding, with reduced costs, greater output, faster request fulfilment and better control.
Solution
Considering the holding structure and territorially demanding location of individual operations, ENERGOCHEMICA had to find a supplier with references from complex projects, which would be able to propose a comprehensive solution and adapt it to the individual needs of the holding. It opted for PosAm Servio – an excellently developed ticketing system for automated management of tasks and people, which allowed the PosAm team to install it swiftly to the existing environment. The company’s decision was affirmed during the two-month demo operation of PosAm Servio, where it verified the functioning of the prepared changes in practice.
The greatest challenge was to define the services catalogue. The first step was to make a detailed initial process analysis using the ITIL V3 methodology. This helped create a design of the process settings for Incident management, Request fulfilment, Configuration management and Service level management. In this step, PosAm proposed a description of commercial services (aimed at the user) and technical services (aimed at the provider), which specifies what services the Service Desk provides, who performs them and to what standard of quality. In the next step, we set up the CMDB (configuration database) structure, which records elements of the whole IT infrastructure from the servers, right through to the end devices. Having well-established links between the CMDB and the services catalogue has shown to be a fundamental requirement for assigning the right people to the requested tasks, prompt fulfilment of the tasks and assessment of problem areas, meaning for the functioning of the system as a whole.
This complex, extensive and fundamental change to the functioning of the system required the gradual start up of the whole system. As part of a two-month period of pilot operation for selected services (end devices), PosAm fine-tuned the system and verified the accuracy of how tasks are assigned, fulfilled and reported. Once this phase was evaluated, the solution was then applied to the rest of the defined business and technical services within the holding.
The preparation and application of the project, from system analysis through to the design and implementation of the solution, then launch to live operation, took under six months. In that time, four months were absorbed by the initial phase, with the remaining 60 days comprising the pilot operation. Since September 2013, the system has been in full operation, including tools for accelerating and improving the management of IT requests, which means further enhancement of the whole process of the Service desk and the management of user support and IT operations.
The implemented solution has all the requirements for extended functionality to include additional services, such as reporting faults in production and production systems management, or connection to the IT environment monitoring system.
Results and benefits
Thanks to the PosAm solution, the ENERGOCHEMICA holding is equipped with a tool that effectively covers the management of IT requests, including human and material resources. A fully-fledged Single Point of Contact (SPOC) amalgamated the processes for reporting and fulfilling requests. This standardisation and automation accelerated, improved and simplified the whole process. Today, services are predictable from the perspective of their fulfilment (who, when, how), quality (e.g. request fulfilment time upon an incident) and cost. The availability of the systems raised the comfort of the 500 employees of the holding who use the IT infrastructure on a daily basis. The allocation and utilisation of employees dealing with request fulfilment was improved, duplicate expenses for the same staff within the holding were eliminated, and they can now also be shared throughout the group. Last but not least, the management received a tool that lets them monitor and evaluate provided services from the perspective of quality and economics, and which provides the overviews and data needed to make strategic decisions in respect of IT.
Quotation
“The solution from PosAm thrust us miles ahead in the field of IT request and support management. In a short space of time, we went from having an unsuitable solution for IT requests in terms of processes, costs and quality, to having an automated system with standardised processes, and centralised management and control. All with greater quality and cost-effectiveness.”
Main benefits of the solution
Automation of entire process, meaning:
- shorter time from request submission and request fulfilment by a third of the original time
- increased productivity of request fulfilment by 20%
- 96% of requests are resolved in line with the SLA