Last quarter, we introduced our quarterly Managed Service Most Valuable Player Award
as a way of recognising the generosity our customers show when sharing
their innovations with their peers in other companies. We had a
phenomenal response to our first award and it was brilliant to see our
customers receiving the recognition for the work we complete together.
As
a Managed Service MVP, each winner will have played an important part
in developing a new application or functionality that has subsequently
been taken on by our other Managed Service customers.
It is now time to crown our next winner and it is our great pleasure to announce that Barj Duhra, Head of Technology Services & Support at Avanti West Coast is our new Managed Service MVP!
Barj
has been driving a full programme of process and service improvement
within Avanti West Coast (AWC) and is working tirelessly to instil an
ethos of ‘getting the basics right in order to support innovation’. We
have worked in partnership with Barj on a number of initiatives to
support this mandate, the most noteworthy being the improvement and
automation of Hardware Asset Management, including the joiner, leaver
and mover processes, to deliver full end to end facilitation and
automation.
We worked with Barj and his team at AWC to fully
document and design an end to end process in order to understand,
formalise and, most importantly, simplify and automate the following
aspects surrounding Hardware Asset Management:
- Standard Service Catalogue items
– streamlining the service catalogue items for ordering hardware to
guide the end user to the right place and gather the relevant
information required at first entry. This includes establishing a
product model and category structure to ensure the items supported
changes in make and model
- Service catalogue workflows
– creation of a single, data driven hardware request workflow to
automate a large portion of the provisioning process without ServiceNow
overhead
- Stock levels and automated ordering –
use of stockrooms and thresholds to ensure stock levels never go below a
defined level. The procurement workflow is automatically triggered and
stock is ordered for transfer or purchase
- Automatic asset updates in line with workflows
– as the asset is built, transferred or delivered the workflow in
ServiceNow uses the data from all supporting processes to update the
status, location and ownership of the asset without any manual
intervention. This means all assets are up to date at all times
- Display asset information to end users
– gives end users the ability to view which assets are assigned to
them. This also supports a mechanism to report data inaccuracies and a
workflow to manage these should they occur
- Targeted knowledge base articles and chat conversations
– knowledge base articles are highlighted to end users based on the
assets assigned to them. We are also developing Virtual Agent chat
conversations to guide the end user by drawing on asset data to reduce
the escalation of incidents and requests driving a shift left initiative
- Faster and more accurate incident logging
– we only present assets to the service desk which are assigned to the
impacted user, this speeds up incident logging and targets assignments
and knowledge searches more effectively
- Joiners, movers and leavers process
– the asset management solution ties in with the three JML processes to
manage assets for delivery, reclamation or move. This includes the
automation of user account provisioning and management
- Direct link and auto escalation to Incident Management Process
– the catalogue items are configured to automatically alert the
relevant teams should a hardware item be reported as lost, stolen or
damaged, ensuring the right process is followed and the most desirable
outcome met
- Reclamation and controlled disposal process
– when assets are returned, the process supports both recondition and
reuse of items and the disposal process. This allows AWC to reuse kit
which is not end of life and save on procurement costs whilst
controlling needed disposals and ensuring security measures are met.
The
work we have delivered with AWC has now been turned into one of our
Managed Service ‘accelerators’. By keeping the process future proof and
supplier/item agnostic, and by delivering a modular solution, not only
were we able to give AWC a process with minimal overhead and high
return, we were also able to share this process with our other customers
– our friends at HS2 have implemented parts of the solution that they
needed and all in record time.
The big question now is – who will
be next? We have loved watching how this award sparks competition and
innovation among our customers, and their willingness to share their
achievements with their peers is amazing. So get involved, throw your
hat in the ring and maybe your next innovative solution could end up
with a Managed Service MVP award for you!
We’d like to extend a
huge thank you to Barj and the team over at AWC for their continued
partnership, willingness to innovate and do things right! Congratulations Barj!!!
