Case study Implementation for an IT Service Provider company performing on site HW maintenance
Introduction GPITiner is a new generation ITIL V3 / ISO 20000 based IT Service Management Tool, developed by GPIT Services Ltd.. The software package is designed by highly experienced ITIL Expert IT managers and specialists, who are not only designing this tool but also using it in their daily work. Beyond the features usually available in such a tool, GPIT Services is focusing on additional functionality, which is needed very much for the Business- and IT Management to have a complete solution. It covers, amongst other functionality, support for business planning and pricing, TCO calculation of services and configuration items, human resources planning, planned and actual working time monitoring and comparison based on timesheet, inventory control including store handling for spare parts, real time process monitoring, etc. This feature set ensures an all in one IT Service Management solution for the IT department of SME companies and IT service providers. It achieves more effective, efficient and controlled IT services, and the state of the art.net software environment and Microsoft Azure Cloud based SaaS results in a low system cost which ensures a short ROI time. Company profile Our Customer is an SME size IT service provider company. The company s main business line is the server, disk system and workstation maintenance on a 7*24 basis according to SLAs. Hardware sale is also available, but with limited volumes. Their clients are both multinational and local companies, which outsourced the HW maintenance work to our Customer. They are servicing 40+ clients. The company is employing 10+ engineers for the maintenance work, one person as a Service Manager and two persons for Customer Service. The challenges The company is working in a market of high competition where the demand for HW maintenance work is decreasing continuously due to the economic crisis. Parallel to this, the competition is pushing down the prices in order to survive and so the clients are demanding higher quality and better service level for a lower price. Our Customer wants to stabilize its client base and tries to grow on the narrowing market by giving high quality services on a relatively low price. In order to achieve this as a first step they identified the following issues in their current service provision setup. There are no processes implemented for the services given by the company so everybody is performing its activities on a best effort basis. This also means that the level of organizational knowledge is very low and so the operational risk is high. This situation could cause serious problems should the organization expand in the future. 2
The company is seeking for some standards or best practices to improve their operation. Real cost of services given is not known, just estimations are available. It is true both for consumed working time and the spare parts built in at flat fee maintenance services. This situation prevents the management from analyzing the profitability of the services performed and makes uncertain the price calculation of offers for new clients and services. Call registration is not professional being paper based. It is a big issue how to check whether the reported device is covered by the SLA and if so, then under which service and service level.. This results in non-contracted works being undertaken, which results in direct loss for the company. It is also hard to find out what service level is contracted for what device. The Servicedesk agents sometimes know it by heart, sometimes it can be found out from the SLAs. It is not a reliable way of scheduling. No CMDB is available, but SLA addendums are used to identify the devices concerned by the services. As the company is repairing servers and other devices there is quite a wide range of spare parts that are stored in the main store, in stores placed on the client locations and service cars are also equipped with the basic spare part stock. Currently there is no inventory registration which could be available and useful for the engineer staff to check the stock online. The current inventory control solution satisfies the accounting requirements, but no information is available on the technical parameters which would be important for the service engineers. KPIs of the services given are not monitored and not reported to the management and to the clients. For many clients it seems to be a serious drawback. The solution GPIT Services implemented GPITiner The IT Service Management Tool for the company, as a complete solution for creating a new ITIL V3 based operational background for the services provided by the company. Before the system implementation, GPIT Services ITIL experts designed the new ITIL V3 compliant processes and created a CMDB structure together with the expertise of the Customer. The CMDB includes the spare parts, and includes those technical parameter description fields which have to be known for the full technical identification of the devices and spare parts. The system can handle different CI description fields per CI category. The resulting CMDB maintains all information which is needed for the professional maintenance work and to precisely select the spare parts to be replaced. 3
Service catalogue design is made by the analyses of SLAs, and together with their staff, taking into account future plans of the Company. The next phase was the system setup. Business processes IT is the business of the service provider. By analyzing the services of the company the following processes were developed based on ITIL V3 best practices: fixed fee HW support case by case HW repair regular preventive HW maintenance equipment sale equipment sale with implementation IT equipment/data center removal HW installation HW assessment GPITiner has a fully flexible workflow builder capability, which allows the easy build-up of any workflow needed. A workflow consists of a series of work orders with predefined execution rules. A work order is a single task of a single employee with a deadline and approval rules for quality assurance. Further features of the workflow engine are the following: handling parallel activities optional tasks/flow segments in workflow definitions predefined rejection path archiving of rejected work order data setup of approval rules adding new work order to predefined workflows full status control on work order and main documents automated item content data inheritance among work orders e-mail and/or SMS sending upon new work order arrival KPIs in the workflow KPIs in the SLA are not always connected to the timely execution of a whole process, rather related to the finishing of a specific work order in the workflow. E.g. in case of the fixed fee HW support the KPI is the finishing of the on-site repair works at the Customer location. In spite of the fact that the workflow continues after this work order with internally important steps, for e.g. quality assurance, CMDB update and customer satisfaction review, the work order representing the KPI can be marked as a milestone in the system and all KPI calculations will take into consideration this measurement point. 4
Workflow scheduling Automated workflow scheduling is crucial for high quality service provision. KPI related work orders and internally critical work orders are advised to be assigned to a deadline. As it is a very time consuming effort in case of many items and as manual scheduling may bring many mistakes with it, only the automated solution can really work. GPITiner makes the scheduling of the workflow of incidents, requests, etc. starting from the recording time of the related call, considering the opening time (business hours) of the service overtime service is available/offered or not offset to daily closing time of service, when call resolution activity is bumped to next business day CI location access time requirement (travelling time) correction SLA-Service-Service Plan-CI structure Multi-service SLAs were setup by using the Service Catalogue. The catalogue maintains both the business and technical services in a tree hierarchy, and also handles the relationship between the services and the CIs. By introducing service plans the different levels belonging to an SLA can be handled. Incoming calls are assigned to SLAs in order to prevent non-contracted work being undertaken and to clearly identify the service to provide and the service level required. Service identification can be done by direct selection of the SLA and service fields, or, by selecting the CI. Frequently the caller is only referring to the CI which has an incident. This system feature makes it easy to identify the service needed. The system also supports a very sophisticated service opening time (business hours) definition and usage. Opening time could be defined by country, by service provider, by customer, by SLA, by service and by service plan. It also covers whether overtime service is available/offered or not, and the offset to daily closing time of service, when call resolution activity is bumped to next business day. Scheduler function is using this definition to calculate the deadline by considering the physical location of the CI by adding the time needed to travel to the location, where the repair task should be done. According to the SLA milestones could be defined within the solution workflow, e.g. mandatory arrival time to the location of the CI within a predefined timeframe, etc. This feature performs automatic deadline calculation of all critical working phases promised for the client in the SLA. It is very useful both for the prevention of SLA violation by automated escalation by the system and for service level reporting. 5
CMDB, inventory control and store handling CMDB setup was done according to extended category tree and additional data fields for deep technical parameters of devices and spare parts. Initial data capture was done partly by capturing CI data and partly by uploading Excel files containing CI information. Both initial CI upload and CI verification function is available in GPITiner. There are two types of Configuration items that can be handled by the system. As it is standard, many CIs are identified by a unique identifier, which can be a serial number or an inventory number. This is the way to inventory unique items, like servers, printers, disks, etc. But there are spare parts, which have low individual value and it is not practical to identify them uniquely, as no serial number is put by the manufacturer on the part, for e.g. cables, screws, etc. These CIs are handled by quantity as a stock of a certain type of part. GPITiner also handles the stores containing the unused configuration items. All movements could be booked within the system in order to follow the moving of the items from booking in when it was purchased to the end phase of booking out when it is scrapped or sold. The movements between stores and between organisations (e.g. a spare part located in a store of the service provider is built in to a server of a customer) are handled in bundles to minimize data capture need. Relationships of the CIs are also maintained automatically right at the moment when they are moved. By maintaining stores, inventory registration is available. Number of stores handled by the system is unlimited. Usually the main store, the so called private store of an engineer and the outplaced stores at the customer location are registered. GPITiner Mobile By using the smart phone functionality of the system, field work is documented on-line and in real time. Engineers register the work executed on site by the smart phone, while managers receive automated escalations and approval requests to their phone. This speeds up the whole process execution and creates additional value for their clients. Timesheet registration In order to track the performed tasks GPITiner offers timesheet registration functionality. It avoids the usual problem that the employee does not remember the tasks performed when trying to fill in the independent timesheet system. GPITiner shows the tasks owned by the employee on a specific day and only the time used field has to be filled in. the timesheet also ensures that the total time of the given shift has to be filled in with activities. Holiday, sick leave, training, meetings, etc. also can be registered in the timesheet to have the complete picture of the shift. Filled in shift (daily) timesheets have to be approved by the manager in order to have control on time spent. 6
The system is cumulating the time used for work orders, calls and all entities, like incident, problem, change, etc. to have the easy access from this view too. TCO calculation In order to recalculate the cost of human effort and the cost of the replaced spare parts belonging to a service, or to a configuration item, the system calculates time spent on a specific service or CI from the timesheet and collects all CIs which were built in to another CI as a spare part from the CI movement data. These help the management to make a cost calculation for the services given and to make forecasts for the following period to help to prepare proposals for the future services as competitively as possible. The result The company reorganized its IT Operation according to ITIL V3 which is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. The implementation changed the company culture from the ad hoc type of work execution to a process driven well controlled and documented approach and status. Level of organizational knowledge is increased and level of continuity risk decreased a lot. Well-organized operation resulted in cost saving and stability of the services provided. It also increased the satisfaction level of Customers. Call registration is done in GPITiner, and after the categorization, the appropriate workflow (e.g. incident) is generated by the system. Scheduling is also done automatically by the system to prevent any mistakes. Engineers are receiving e-mail/sms about their new tasks (work orders) and the execution of work orders are confirmed in a real time manner by using smart phones. Administration of services is fully computerized, requires less human efforts and ensures archives of all tasks done. CMDB of serviced clients and spare part stock in the stores of the Company are maintained by GPITiner. All inventory movements are followed by the system and engineers can enquire about the current spare part stock with their smart phone in case of need. Appropriate recalculation and planning data is provided by GPITiner to evaluate the past cost level and to make proposals. Service level is monitored by KPIs and reported to clients. 7
Quality assurance is introduced, critical work orders have to be approved by a peer employee and a separated QA (Quality Assurance) phase is also added to all processes. Evaluation The Company is an SME. Nowadays it is not usual to have ITIL V3 based IT service management solution in these small entrepreneurships. The main reason beyond this fact is the shortage of appropriate management knowledge about service management solutions and the shortage of affordable software solutions. This implementation proves that the small scale ITIL implementations are feasible for small companies which want to provide high quality services at a reasonable price. GPITiner implementation opened the door to the Company for growing, based on an effective, efficient and controlled IT Operation. For further information please contact info@gpit.eu. 8