Global Managed Service Provider MTI Technology engaged Devoteam to streamline its service and event management with ServiceNow ITSM and ITOM solutions.
Around for nearly 30 years, MTI Technology is a global provider of IT and IT security solutions and services. This MSP monitors storage and infrastructure for 1,800 customers with 2,600 contracts from its 10 offices worldwide.
Main challenges
Event monitoring and resolution
With many service team across the business using a highly customised legacy service desk and a mixture of infrastructure monitoring tools, MTI was handling hundreds of emails and 40,000 events received per day (one every two seconds), with all the implications for efficiency that that entails.
Complex integrations developed in-house were producing hundreds of emails that needed manual attention, resulting in operator-based de-duplication, manual entry of incidents and, ultimately, the risk of human error. In addition, the CMDB and Asset Registers were siloed and could not be leveraged.
The company relied on a small team of eight overworked and under-appreciated engineers to provide cover around the clock. They could not easily identify critical events that needed action.
Simon Walters, Director of Managed and Cloud Services at MTI, commented: “Our small team of customer support staff was facing burnout at the number of incidents being generated. We had to take action to eradicate employee fatigue which would eventually take its toll on our business.”
What did we solve?
Transforming service availability with automation
MTI engaged Devoteam as subject matter experts to reshape MTI’s existing deployment of Incident, Change and Problem, and to integrate three existing Infrastructure management tools into ServiceNow to improve service availability.
Devoteam began with consultancy workshops to define and capture requirements, analyse data fields and create a plan to align infrastructure monitoring fields to ServiceNow event fields.
Devoteam configured the ServiceNow ITSM applications to meet MTI’s requirements and then used the monitoring tools’ own functionality to de-duplicate events and ensure that only events already identified as alarms were forwarded.
Simon Walters, Director of Managed and Cloud Services, added:
“We wanted to move from the majority of incidents being raised manually to having them raised automatically. This meant we could avoid duplicate incidents, reduce human error and lighten the huge workload that was bringing fatigue to our support operation.”
We changed the business rules to look up data automatically in the CMDB, based on data contained in the events, in order to pre-populate fields in the incident form and automatically to assign the right support priority actions.
Devoteam built a new customer self-service portal to allow customers to login and view the status of their reported incidents.
Main benefits
Improved effectiveness and customer experience
Since completion of the project huge improvements became apparent. Simon Walters explained: “We managed to de-duplicate the 40,000 events received each day to an average of 333, then with ServiceNow translate those into just 120 alerts to be raised as Incidents automatically inside the new platform. Put differently, we reduced a quarter of a million events per week to fewer than a thousand alerts. This represents a colossal leap for us in terms of the visible service we can offer to our customers. Further, with 99% consolidation of events we will see great dividends in terms of support staff productivity.”
The list of benefits realised by MTI Technology is extensive and includes:
- 15% reduction in the mean time to repair (MTTR) with engineers assigned to resolve issues
- Cost of customer support resources fell by 62%, with the team of eight engineers reduced to three and five re-deployed to strategic projects
- 300% return on investment from the ServiceNow platform
- Transformation of customer experience through a new customer self-service portal and better customer communication all round.
The introduction of ITOM has leveraged MTI Technology’s investment in ServiceNow and provides potential for future enhancements to their business.
Simon Walters, concluded: “You need to define the processes very well, not repeat what you did before. Collaboration with Devoteam made that whole exercise an absolute joy.”
