Case Study – Services Industry

About the Client

The client is India's first private cord blood bank, which  facilitates the cryogenic preservation of umbilical cord blood stem cells at its unique facility in Chennai in South India. The company was started in 2004 in collaboration with the world's largest and oldest stem cell bank, which was established in 1992 and has more than 1, 30,000 cord blood units banked successfully. The client has been granted the prestigious AABB Accreditation. AABB (American Association of Blood Banks) is an international non-profit organization dedicated to developing the highest standards in blood and cord blood banking, transfusion medicine and cellular therapy.

The organization’s IT architecture includes:

  • 5+ Servers
  • Database Management Systems (SQL Server);
  • Operating Systems (Windows 2003, and several Windows client flavors); and
  • Multi location Sales & Administrative offices
  • 200+ desktops.

Challenges Faced:

Initially the customer used to handle incidents and track assets using a manual spreadsheet based application. As the business grew, resulting in increase in assets, asset management had become tedious and time consuming. Also capturing complete information about assets and incidents becomes a challenge. When an incident gets logged in, the service desk or the technician had to query the spreadsheet file for the system information and it was not handy. This increased the response time, even for a simple request. The technicians had to work for extended hours to create the daily reports and mail it to the IT manager and at times, they were unable to send the reports on the specified time frame. The existing systems were found to be out of scope for their requirements and hence a solution to implement a software tool is proposed.

The Need:

The IT team wanted a tool that can provide complete information of Asset, user & call information they had decided to change the situation. The critical features that the business demands from the tool are;

  • Easy-to use Self service Portal
  • User Management
  • Helpdesk functionality
  • SLA for Assets, Incidents & Vendors
  • Escalation for proactive monitoring of Incidents
  • Asset Tracking & Inventory Management

Solution Proposed:

The client had decided to compare & evaluate various tools to achieve their goal. The client approached Precision for a solution. Precision suggested the InsTILTM Xpress version after discussing with the IT functionaries and a product feature presentation was made based on the customer requirements.

Solution Offered:

InsTIL enabled the IT to function efficiently, by providing history of Assets, Incidents and users for technicians to deep dive into the problem. Integration with AD eased the IT team in Asset Capturing and bulk user import. SLA & Escalation were defined to proactively monitor and control the incidents. The Network scan feature provided the entire information of hardware and software of all the assets available in the network and a snapshot view of all assets were listed based on category in the network view option.  The software dashboard provided a snapshot of licensed and unlicensed installations, which helped technicians to take remedial actions to comply with software and hardware audits. Asset management became easier and reminders were triggered for AMC and Warranty, which helped them manage support contracts easily. Detailed reports on Asset, Call & SLA were provided to the management any time by the IT team. The solutions that the client derived from the tool were;

  • Easy to use Web based Helpdesk tool
  • Simplified user call logging process
  • Efficient process to manage SLA & Escalation
  • Integrated remote management tool
  • Detailed information about Hardware & Software inventory
  • Vendor Management
  • Schedule network scan for updating asset information
  • AD based Approval process for standard or simple user change requests
  • Easy to deploy and maintain
  • Agent less asset discovery through WMI & SNMP
  • Ability to create multiple networks
  • Call assign to multiple technicians, in series or parallel and activity definition for each of them.
  • Organization calendar for work time definition and holiday entry, which forms the basic rule for SLA functionality.

Benefits to client:

After a rigorous evaluation based on their live scenarios, the client decided to implement InsTILTM as the Helpdesk tool. Precision’s A2E Implementation Methodology had successfully enabled the product Go-live on the client’s target date. After the product implementation the customer had realized the benefits and how they transformed the situation to meet business goals. The overall benefits that the client had achieved were;

  • Solution that can be tailored, scaled and migrated to manage growth
  • Network scan enabled the IT Team to capture asset information and asset changes were updated through schedule scan
  • Up to date Asset details.
    • With the manual import option through excel format, the IT team were able to capture the inventory, SLA & location details of assets with ease.
  • SLA’s & Escalation defined & handled delivering QoS
  • System Uptime increased to 99%
  • Substantial reduction in overdue incidents
  • 100% user satisfaction