The Warehouse Group is an iconic, NZ-listed retail discount group with over 125 stores in New Zealand and 2005 revenues in excess of NZ$2.2 billion.

The group has 11 service desk staff in New Zealand to handle call volumes of between 3,500 to over 4,000 per month. First tier call resolution rates are approximately 40 per cent. After embarking on an evaluation of its organisational processes in mid-2004, the group decided to address future process improvements using the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice framework.

Shubha Raniga, service manager at The Warehouse Group, says the expiry of the maintenance period on the group’s existing helpdesk tool provided a good opportunity to “see what else was out there.”

At the same time, there were increasing internal frustrations with limitations of the existing tool. It prevented the help desk from achieving a higher independent benchmark based on ITIL, the customisable best practice framework developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

Solution
The Warehouse Group initially evaluated several help desk solutions, before selecting FrontRange Solutions IT Service Management (ITSM) solution.

FrontRange ITSM is a modular, integrated service management architecture comprising a series of modules based on ITIL and other IT best practices. The platform enables organisations to reduce infrastructure complexity and lower costs while providing the flexibility and agility needed to remain competitive.

“We chose FrontRange because we wanted to do our process review hand-in-hand with the solution using its pre-defined ITIL processes as a jump-start, rather than redefining our processes and not necessarily achieving best practice or mapping them effectively into the new tool,” she says.

Results
Since implementing ITSM, The Warehouse Group has achieved significant ITIL maturity increases across its processes.

“Before implementing ITSM, our service desk maturity was rated two out of five, and our incident management rated one out of five. Within a week of going live with FrontRange, the maturity of both processes was worth three out of five,” says Raniga.

Management reporting has also been a significant benefit for the Group. “The dashboards within the solution are great. We will also use MicroStrategy as our enterprise-wide reporting tool, and are currently working on integrating it with ITSM,” says Raniga.

Process maturity is also translating into increased customer satisfaction – a measure that is calculated independently of ITSM.

“Our customer satisfaction scores are on the rise – some of that is to do with the process improvements and some more due to the sheer fact that there is more transparency and visibility in the system which is aiding our management of the business’s expectations,” says Raniga.

The addition of a formal, integrated SLA module has been a key contributor to managing expectations. The old system didn’t allow the help desk to track service levels or put targets in.

More significantly, the implementation of SLAs through FrontRange ITSM signifies a fundamental shift in the way the help desk operates.

“We now have the ability to stop thinking system and start thinking service, which was a major change for the IT part of the business. We’ve always been focused around the systems for delivery and all of a sudden have to think about the end-to-end service we’re providing to the business,” says Raniga.

“It’s fundamentally changed the way we look at ourselves and align ourselves to the business. At the same time, having one tool as opposed to multiple spreadsheets and systems, the increased visibility and integration aspects of ITSM has also been a huge gain for the business,” she says.

For more information
www.frontrange.com.au

May 2006