Centris optimises user support with integrated service desk

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1 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY Centris optimises user support with integrated service desk CUSTOMER PROFILE Industry: IT services Company: Centris AG, Solothurn, Switzerland Revenue: 2008 sales: 46.7M SFR Employees: 160 BUSINESS Centris is one of the foremost IT service providers for health and accident insurers in Switzerland. The Swiss Health Platform (SHP) provides insurers with IT functionality for core business processes. CHALLENGE To provide support to customers using SHP, which includes a packaged service desk module, Centris needed to improve its change, release and incident management processes. SOLUTION CA Service Desk Manager has enabled Centris and its customers to integrate and automate IT support processes. In particular, the correlation and prioritisation of tickets has reduced the IT workload. BENEFIT Centris and its customers can operate more efficient service desks, with analysts handling more tickets in the same timeframe. CA Service Desk Manager has also helped to speed up the resolution of IT faults, improving productivity. we can

2 Business Efficient IT services for health and accident insurers Centris began its business life in 1947 as a department of the Concordat of Swiss Sickness Insurers. Since 2002, it has been listed as a public limited company under Swiss law and has developed into a modern IT services provider for health and accident insurers in Switzerland. Around 4,500 users at 28 Swiss health and accident insurance companies use the services provided by Centris. The company is focused on optimising investment and operating costs for its customers, which it achieves by offering standard solutions and leveraging a common technological platform. Its portfolio comprises a variety of modular IT solutions and services that support customers business processes in a professional, efficient and secure manner. The company s offerings encompass approximately 90 percent of its customers core back-office processes. The Swiss Health Platform (SHP) is a recent addition to the Centris portfolio, and provides insurance companies with advanced functionality and support for all their core business processes from product development and sales to inventory and financial management. Companies can either sign up for an end-to-end solution or the individual modules required by their business. Centris places particular value on the skills of its employees. Besides the necessary IT expertise, approximately one third of the Centris workforce also has practical experience in the health and accident insurance industry and therefore has a greater understanding of customers business requirements. Challenge New service desk to support new customer offerings Centris has five business divisions fulfilling different roles. These include Product Management, Administration, IT Operations and Systems Engineering and the SHP Introduction Division, which is responsible for implementing the application for individual customers. The fifth division Customer and Market Business fulfils a number of tasks, for example looking after existing customers and winning new business. This includes managing changes, releases and incidents for Centris solutions deployed to customer sites. These activities both for customers and internal users are co-ordinated by a central service desk, the role of which had become increasingly important following the launch of SHP, which also includes a packaged service desk module. Although SHP offers Centris customers significantly improved features and services, this also means that the application is quite complicated, making change, release and incident management more elaborate. As a result, Centris needs a service desk solution that can capture more information on change requests and incident tickets. 02

3 The company s service desk requirements had also changed following its decision to embark on a major IT transformation project, which involves migrating core applications to a new Unix environment. Martin Cetin, Head of the Customers and Markets Division at Centris, explains, We needed a service desk that could provide integrated support to our customers, suppliers, and staff based on standard processes. Solution Automated incident management for over 4,500 users After a brief market analysis, Centris chose CA Service Desk Manager, based on its extensive integration capabilities and the ease of deployment for multiple customers. The CA Technologies solution is easy to maintain and support in-house, which simplifies the administrative workload, comments Cetin. Another factor was the many years of co-operation between Centris and CA Technologies. In February 2009, Centris set up a four-week pilot project jointly with CA Technologies, CA Technologies partner Freundsoft and a first SHP customer. Following this pilot, Centris went on We needed a service desk that could provide integrated support to our customers, suppliers, and staff. Martin Cetin Head of the Customers and Markets Division, Centris AG, Solothurn, Switzerland to deploy CA Service Desk Manager internally and will gradually migrate more SHP customers to enable fully automated and integrated incident management. One of Centris major customers has already installed CA Service Desk Manager as its proprietary first level support system as part of its adoption of SHP. This enables it to centrally record queries from end users using the solution s self-service tools. A team of 10 service desk analysts use the solution to track queries from some 1,300 insurance workers at the company. 03

4 In total, 4,500 users at Centris and its customer and supplier organisations currently use CA Service Desk Manager to log IT requests and problems. Since the solution was introduced in the spring of 2009, around 3,000 IT requests or incidents have been managed via CA Service Desk Manager. For Centris IT team, this has dramatically simplified incident and problem management especially since the CA Service Desk Manager has been integrated with other IT management tools and applications used by the company. For example, if there is an error with a batch process, a corresponding ticket is automatically created with the error message and forwarded on to the correct resolver group. The correct definition of a problem and the identification of the relevant resolver group is an important process within CA Service Desk Manager, says Cetin. It was therefore essential that we adapted and optimised our processes before introducing this solution. This is why we have observed ITIL best practice methods and integrated the CA solution with other applications to enable greater automation. CA Service Desk Manager has also simplified incident management for Centris through the correlation of errors and tickets and prioritisation of problems. As Cetin confirms, Correlation and prioritisation of IT problems has helped us automate a lot of our day-to-day IT processes, which has reduced the workload of our IT administration team. Correlation and priorisation of IT problems has helped us automate a lot of our day-to-day IT processes. Martin Cetin Head of the Customers and Markets Division, Centris AG, Solothurn, Switzerland 04

5 Benefit Greater productivity and customer satisfaction Thanks to CA Service Desk Manager and ITIL processes, Centris and its customers have been able to adopt simplified, automated and more transparent IT support processes. This means the same number of service desk analysts can now process more tickets in the same timeframe. In addition, Centris can now offer its customers better reporting and operational statistics as part of its SHP product, which will be key to the company s service availability ambitions. Centris is currently implementing new customer contracts, as Cetin explains, SLAs scarcely played a role in the early days of IT. However, today we must guarantee that the applications used by our customers are available more than 99.9 percent of the time. CA Service Desk Manager has given us the opportunity for precise control and measurement, as well as greater service support transparency, which means we can provide our customers with an accurate status at all times. 4,500 Centris staff, customers and suppliers use CA Service Desk Manager to log IT requests and problems As well as enabling Centris to evolve its service support and customer offerings, CA Service Desk Manager has also led to: Faster fault resolution Improved staff productivity Greater customer satisfaction 05

6 Centris is hoping to build on these benefits with the planned introduction of the knowledge management tools that are integral to the CA Service Desk Solution. The functionality of CA Service Desk Manager differentiates Centris from its competition, because high application availability and fast problem resolution are key criteria in the insurance business, says Cetin. The functionality of CA Service Desk Manager differentiates Centris from its competition. Martin Cetin Head of the Customers and Markets Division, Centris AG, Solothurn, Switzerland Copyright 2010 CA Technologies. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages.