There was an overarching need to maintain a consistent high level of service across the critical systems that they use to drive operations. The demand for increased efficiency required system upgrades, implementation and integration of new and existing products in a seamless manner. The internal team of two, while adept in all facets of the operation, couldn’t “create” the time to handle all the tasks before them. The skill level necessary to implement new systems and upgrades without business interruption was also a challenge.
They needed a team to augment their internal staff that understood the technologies they employ, was adept at implementing systems upgrades, and could provide a high level of expertise in Training, Quality Assurance, ITSM, DBA and Mobile Apps administration.
They were able to do the following without increasing headcount:
✔ Effectively implement system upgrades
✔ Train the team on operations
✔ Determine future needs
✔ Whenever needed, to operate as the ITSM staff
Efficient provisioning, monitoring and service management of a growing retail terminal population. Terminal uptime is critical to business performance. Staffing limitations require handling consistent growth without adding physical headcount to the network services team.
When a new retail site is approved, the service technician can deliver the terminal unit preconfigured for communication across the system network introducing greater efficiency to IT operations. Network administration can monitor the terminal performance and alert the team to any inconsistencies or outages.
Within 45 days, field installation time was reduced by 45%, system-wide terminal uptime rose in excess of 15%, and the team was able to manage their increasing retail terminal footprint without increase the service team headcount.
The ability to ensure that the software critical to every facet of an online eCommerce operation is deployed to all. Ensuring the uptime of service across all the components of the network. Given the dispersed nature of the operations servers, and the fragmented silos of management that exist in their environment, there was never a clear-cut way to ascertain that the needed updates were deployed across all arms of the operation. Any outage within the operations server environment could be costly in terms of loss of retail sales, company reputation, and departmental efficiency.
What was needed was a facility that when Operation Server software needed to be upgraded, the Operations team could automatically push those service monitoring updates across the entire server population and log that update for compliance and server maintenance reports. Also when a server application or function outage occurred, the team needed to be made aware of the situation via automated notification – a system wide outage Dashboard to effectively administer the needed corrections immediately. IT operations adjustments were a must.
After implementation, System Software version control improved immensely, freeing the operation’s team time. Operations Systems service response in just the first quarter thereafter, saw a 20% uptime improvement and it continues to grow!
Maintaining accurate server software license ownership and usage information across their Global Operations footprint was creating an ever-increasing economic drain on the business. With no visibility into license utilization the company paying maintenance for licenses deployed, but not used. The knowledge and experience to pull this information from the Server tools available was beyond the team’s capability level.
The Company needed a cost reducing workflow process that metered utilization and provided license harvesting such that when a deployed license could been seen as not being utilized the workflow would shift that license to a new user as opposed to activating a new license and incurring its associated fees for usage and maintenance. Service management and automation was needed to achieve this.
Within 3-4 year period this license harvesting / workflow process was responsible for savings of $500k annually in licensing expense.
