HEAT applied to Foodstuffs' service desk bottleneck
Supermarket and food group Foodstuffs South Island is using Frontrange’s HEAT solution to identify bottlenecks and hold ups at its busy service desk...
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Foodstuffs South Island is a major wholesaling and retailing group which includes Pak’n Save, New World, Four Square Supermarkets, and On the Spot stores throughout the South Island. It also owns service station supplier Trents Wholesale, and Murdoch Manufacturing, which provides private label products such as Pams and Budget. The company’s service desk supports two main systems: Profound, which manages Foodstuffs’ host-maintained pricing structure, and INCA, which is used to collect information at the point of sale. On average the desk receives 3,500 inbound support calls and 2,500 emails per month, and also makes similar volumes of outbound contacts. Bottlenecks Kerry Baldwin, service desk manager at Foodstuffs, explains. “We were just logging calls without being able to define whether or not a particular incident was isolated or part of an ongoing problem. This led to every call being dealt with as an isolated incident, and the prospect of achieving incident-problem separation being confined to the ‘too-hard basket’.” At the same time, Foodstuffs wanted to build stronger links between its service desk system and separate change management system, an in-house developed Lotus Notes database. “We were at the point where there was a lot of duplicated effort in the systems. We needed to upgrade to a service desk solution that was capable of taking out some of this duplicity and free up the change analysts to resolve the problems rather than re-enter information that already exists in another system,” explains Baldwin. “The decision to upgrade was also closely tied to an internal push to embrace the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best-practice framework in the way the service desk approached incident, problem and change management. “We’re just beginning on the path to ITIL compliance so we needed a solution that would enable us to streamline the process and cultural change elements associated with the move,” says Baldwin. Solution HEAT provides an easy-to-use, full-featured customer service and support solution with a single view of the customer, allowing organisations to reduce labour and systems costs, streamline customer support interactions and improve customer retention. One of the key reasons HEAT was chosen was due to its strong local support in New Zealand – something that would become critically important to fulfilling the service desk’s long-term plans for ITIL compliance. The company engaged with FrontRange Solutions’ accredited partner, Olympic Software, to customise HEAT in preparation for ITIL compliance. Baldwin says the built-in administration tool in HEAT means pretty much anyone can modify and tweak the system on-the-fly without any programming knowledge. “This has made quick changes in-between our ongoing development program possible.” Results Once a repetitive trend is identified by HEAT, the process to log the problem is equally simplified. “With one mouse click we can create a new problem record with the data and assign it to a problem team, while at the same time we can work on the individual incident record as well. Previously creating the problem record was an entirely manual process, if it was done at all,” says Baldwin. The administration tools within HEAT have also enabled the IT department to forge closer ties between the service desk and the change management system, eliminating duplicated effort. “We’ve streamlined our internal processes to the point where incident information no longer needs to be pulled into both systems – the change management team can now generate the reports they need in HEAT, freeing up the analysts from data entry to focus more on analysis and problem resolution,” says Baldwin. “The system is doing what we asked it to do. We’ve already seen some of the benefits of what we’re driving, and the additional customisation through Olympic will help us to continue moving towards a best-practice environment,” says Baldwin. For more information |
December 2006
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