Background
Ultima Business Solutions is an award-winning and leading UK IT services and solutions provider with an annual turnover exceeding £100m.
Ultima enables enterprise organisations to become smarter in the digital age by transforming their workplace, infrastructure and security through automation.
Main Challenges
Breaking down the barriers to create an innovative, scalable solution
Ultima had an existing, long-standing service management tool in place that had been heavily modified over time. Supported by a number of different platforms to deliver infrastructure monitoring, the incumbent tool handled their service requests and IT service management issues and was partially integrated with the company’s main CRM – MS Dynamics.
Limitations in the existing ITSM platform to adapt to the needs of the business had progressively revealed themselves. Following an extensive internal review it was clear that innovation and new technologies would be required to enable Ultima to offer the optimum experience for its clients. Ultimas’ vision spanned a dedicated service desk, branded self-service portals for each customer, enhanced request and customer case management plus improved ITIL processes for incident, problem and change management, an intuitive knowledge base, alert filtering and correlation with automatic ticketing.
Making the right call for its clients
The reality facing Ultima was a platform that lacked the flexibility to add these capabilities at speed, and an eight week deadline from its most valued client to supply them. Ultima had two options. The first was to risk continuing to invest in developing the required functionality with the current service management tool – against a ticking clock and no assurances for delivery. The second was to turn a deadline into a window of opportunity and introduce a new solution that would support its strategy of innovation through automation.
Calculating that a buy-not-build approach would best empower Ultima to meet its client’s expectations, they chose the latter and engaged Devoteam to help make it happen.
What did we solve?
Selecting ServiceNow as the foundation for innovation
Ultima entrusted Devoteam to implement ServiceNow (London release) using an agreed ‘Minimal Viable Product’ requirement that encompassed ServiceNow’s service portal, CSM and ITSM application suites. Knowledge, SLA, Task and Chat would be added to enhance the self-service and task-monitoring capabilities. Ultima chose ServiceNow as its unified single platform can be extended and customised to fit any business workflow – the perfect match for Ultimas’ needs.
Employing Agile and RAD to get a step ahead Using Agile methodology, Devoteam conducted a series of workshops and development sprints, utilising a single collaborative cross-functional team. This ensured that – through SCRUM – responses to changes in requirements were fast. The result was a roadmap for implementation.
To maximise efficiency, Devoteam applied a RAD approach and began configuring the requirements before Ultima’s instances were even available, migrating changes across when they came online. The flexibility of this approach meant Devoteam were able to adapt when the remit started to move beyond ‘Minimum Viable Product’.
“Our go-live of ServiceNow for CSM and ITOM was a complete success! A huge thank you to Devoteam for their support with implementing it all in under 40 days.”
Simon Walters – Director of Services, Ultima Business Solutions
Main Benefits
Delivering operational efficiencies and customer experiences that exceed expectations
Devoteam succeeded in delivering a feature-rich, viable working solution within the eight week timeframe. Ultima were able to transition the rest of their clients quickly using the same scalable platform and application set – exceeding their expectations.
Adopting the ServiceNow CSM solution plus the extended capability of ITOM event management means Ultima can offer its clients a solid base on which to build and customise their service management into the future.
Our solution featured:
- A single service management application that combines data, functionality, and process on one platform
- A self-service portal that empowers Ultima to create separate, branded portals for each of its customers
- An integrated chat feature enabling direct resolution of issues without time-consuming requests or new cases
- Automated service management processes for request management and ITSM
- Feature-rich case management within CSM
- Reduction in event noise resulting in a faster mean time to repair
Increasing potential beyond the project
The new solution gives Ultima’s clients the scope for increasing automation – both automation through orchestration and automation of support tasks.
With ServiceNow in place, clients have the ability to scale adoption of self-service customer portals, introduce Field Service Management, and augment the CMDB through Discovery.