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Automated and streamlined 55,000+ IT and non-IT requests per month
Accelerated pre-approval process from 2 weeks to 1 day
Reduce TCO and streamline processes by consolidating disparate IT departments, and convergence and process alignment to improve management of IT and non-IT service.
The team leading this charge was the ITSM and Enterprise Service Management Process and Tools Department. The department manager explains what was involved in this mammoth effort: “We needed to merge all our processes, such as how incidents, access requests, and change requests are managed. Once all processes were mapped, we then needed to build it into our new solution, and plan a training schedule for users, including our HR and banking colleagues who wanted to take advantage of the new environment. In parallel, we had been investigating solution options. We have a rich history with Micro Focus and were excited to see the capabilities of Micro Focus SMAX, in particular the opportunity to deploy this in Google Cloud, our chosen environment, with native Kubernetes.”
With a global presence of over 12,000 physical stores, welcoming over 13 million customers every day, the organization is working towards being the next global food e-commerce leader. To realize this plan, internal IT systems and processes needed to be streamlined including an array of disparate IT service management (ITSM) tools used by IT teams in various countries. As a first step, all IT departments were merged to make better use of resources and to create a home for a new, centralized Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solution.
Cloud experts and the customer’s operations team with Kubernetes skills worked very closely with Micro Focus to design the new SMAX-based ESM infrastructure. Deployment was uncomplicated and the customer was able to roll out the new system in only a matter of days. The enterprise service management solution is in use across three areas of the business: central IT, HR and an affiliated bank – each with their own SMAX tenant.
Central IT manages ITSM across the organization, using key modules including request, incident, problem, change, and configuration management with 3,000 service desk agents resolving L1 and L2 incidents. The single SMAX portal is accessible to all employees and gives them a modern user experience. The customer configured the service catalog based on employee roles, entitlements, and department, so users can quickly find what they need among 1,000 offerings. This has led to a faster time to resolution and improved end-user autonomy and satisfaction. Central IT has curated 5,000 knowledge articles to help all employees, including the IT staff, and it has a significant positive impact on agent workload and efficiency, and service quality.
DEPARTMENT MANAGER
Multi-national retail organization
The Department Manager comments: “150,000 employees leverage SMAX to submit over 50,000 tickets each month – of which 10,000 are related to non-IT services. Half of all requests are submitted through the self-service portal, and we aim to increase this number.” There are also over 25,000 incidents raised each month, of which 90% are auto-generated from Event Management. The Department Manager continues: “The SMAX implementation has grown organically and we are leveraging the functionality that supports IT services in other areas of the business for enterprise service management. Advanced SMAX functions are very helpful with this. SMAX Studio helps us seamlessly and easily create new applications and workflows aligned to our business process.”
The HR department leverages SMAX to directly provide support and answers on HR-related issues, requests and questions. 60 HR subject matter experts use Live Support to answer over 5,000 requests monthly. HR also manages over 4,500 articles so that employees can self-help, for example finding answers and policies related to annual leave and insurances. HR support agents increase their efficiency by using the suggested solutions and answers powered by embedded machine learning in the Live Support dashboard. The suggestions are automatically provided in the context of the end-user and their issues.
SMAX is also leveraged by an affiliate company offering banking services. The bank has its own IT department and solutions with 20 agents providing support at any one time, and SMAX is used for two key functions. The first is to provide standard IT support managing 2,000 requests and resolving 200 incidents every month both through the SMAX portal and directly with agents. The second is leveraging the SMAX knowledge management module to automate the distribution of regularly changing banking offers and frequently updated procedures to their branches which are typically located near the main locations.
All three SMAX tenants integrate with a business intelligence solution to build KPI-based dashboards.
DEPARTMENT MANAGER
Multi-national retail organization
The customer works with many 3rd parties to offer added-value services in their stores, such as parcel pick-up. The parcel pick-up process was typically done between the individual stores and the courier partners. This made it impossible to centrally impose service levels or manage escalations. In just a couple of days, the team designed and implemented a SMAX workflow to share the relevant information based on established rules and defined incident categories to allow them to work directly with the delivery company. This enabled the stores to manage the end-to-end process, performance and escalations independently of HQ and provide a clear and user-friendly service that provided insights and accountability at each step for the stores.
A more advanced example of where SMAX has added value is in the pre-approval process for stores expenses. Previously every expense had to go through a manual and paper-based process, involving sending signed copies by post. The IT team replicated this process in SMAX for pre-approval. Although the workflow was relatively simple, the rules were complex, involving the budgetary amount, type of expense, and different business unit rules and locations. Ultimately, the workflow needed to be integrated with HR data to establish different authority levels by employee. Once completed, the SMAX-powered process proved to be a huge saver, both for the environment as it is now entirely paper-free, and time. As the Department Manager comments: “It used to take two weeks to process expense approvals. Now, leveraging SMAX, we do it within a day. When you consider we process 6,000 preapprovals every month, you can imagine the savings made.” This process is planned to also manage corporate expenses.
He concludes: “Moving from several ITSM solutions and implementing SMAX has reduced our TCO drastically across infrastructure, maintenance, and teams – even with expanding into non-IT use cases. It is very reliable and scalable; we have the freedom to create more workflows or onboard additional users faster and with less effort. SMAX provides a centralized reporting structure, which is very useful for our management. We implemented service level management and this data is feeding our BI tool and helps track against our KPIs. Having SMAX to manage our requests helps us respond quickly and continue our vital service to the public.” With the IT team experienced and operating efficiently with SMAX they will now focus on further improving the end-user experience by implementing SMAX’s advanced functions and automation across more business processes within the organization.