Support a growing customer base within an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. Finnova wanted its support processes to be standards–based and transparent to its customers. A home developed support ticketing solution needed to be replaced.
Use Micro Focus SBM and SSM to streamline the support ticketing process and provide added value to Finnova customers.
Finnova is a leading provider of banking software in the Swiss financial center. Finnova helps banks and outsourcing providers realize growth in the banking sector, even in challenging times, thanks to efficient and innovative IT solutions compliant with regulatory requirements. Its solution, Finnova Banking Software, is currently used by around 80 universal banks and 20 private banks.
Margin pressure is steadily increasing on banks. This is reflected in tougher competition and increasing regulatory requirements. At the same time, technological innovations are opening up more opportunities which Finnova takes advantage of offering a low total cost of ownership and a short time to market.
Marc Remmlinger, Manager Customer Support, explains how the solution is supported for Finnova clients: “We have a 3 level support system, with 1st line support provided within the client bank, 2nd line support delivered through a partner system, and Finnova provides 3rd line support. We used a home developed support ticketing system to manage communication between all parties. However, with IT infrastructures growing in complexity, the tool was struggling to meet new feature and integration requirements. We felt it was also time to establish ITIL standards around our support management and provide more transparency and easier reporting to our customers. A gap analysis of our current tool confirmed what we were looking for and a thorough market evaluation identified Micro Focus SBM as a potential solution.”
To choose the best solution, Finnova arranged a workshop to look at three different tools, all offering different approaches. Remmlinger comments: “Micro Focus impressed us because the SBM solution was able to create one of our workflows on the go, using a very intuitive interface. The professional attitude, impressive references, and the customer–focused approach Micro Focus displayed convinced us further. We also liked that support, services, and the software itself came from one source.”
The implementation of Micro Focus SBM and SSM took a phased approach. Initially all project staff was trained, internal applications were converted to SBM, reporting was customized, and any questions and concerns were allayed. This was followed by a pilot phase in which one key partner and a customer were moved to SBM. 250 users were trained and 5,000 tickets were migrated to the new system. This phase was an opportunity to correct any transposition errors and share the first experience with SBM. After a couple of months the rollout to all 5 partners and 100 customers saw the migration of 31,000 remaining tickets and the training of 900 key users.
Of the implementation, Remmlinger said: “Micro Focus provided great support during the project and the rollout was smooth as a result. The knowledge transfer to our own support engineers was fantastic and enabled them to start creating quite complex features within the tool, taking full ownership of the development.” Incident management using SSM now includes a sophisticated prioritization based on a calculation of five different fields, indicating the potential impact of an incident. Different support tickets can also be identified as relating to the same root problem, and grouped together, so that multiple customers can be kept updated on the same problem. Over communication via email would be a problem previously and this is solved by giving customers the option to subscribe to just those notifications which are relevant to them.
Micro Focus SBM and SSM were implemented without any downtime or issues. Remmlinger has seen some great benefits: “The deployment was fast and flexible and has enabled us to deliver new functionality to our user base and support our mission of delivering innovative IT solutions."
“Because the solution is so intuitive, the support required is really minimal. With our previous solution, we had 1.5 FTE dedicated to support. We estimate support now only requires 0.25 FTE, which means our resources can focus on new features and interfaces, rather than support and problem resolution."
“The reporting engine automatically delivers fast and dynamic reports for our stakeholders. For instance, we have a KPI dashboard from which a report is automatically emailed, in preparation for the monthly KPI meeting.”
He concludes: “We can see more opportunities to enhance SBM and our processes in the future by interfacing into external ticketing tools. However, for now we are delighted with Micro Focus SBM and SSM. The solution has given us the transparency we were looking for: a true single source of the truth.”