Orienge Case Study. Support Service Management

Company Summary

The client company is a subsidiary of an international group, producing and selling a whole range of sports apparel, footwear and accessories. With a wide assortment of products and over $10 billion annual sales, the Group is a global leader in the sporting goods industry.

Challenges

As the company was rapidly expanding and increasing the number of its stores, the support services management was becoming more and more complex. At some point it was obvious that standard solutions such as Microsoft Excel and Outlook could not cope with the task any longer. Support services data was stored in multiple separate applications; single system storage, enabling data analysis for further administrative decisions, was highly needed.

At the same time, an increasing staff workload, a need for controlling support services, together with high requirements for support requests response time clearly dictated the need for a modern service system.

The project was aimed at improving business processes and general functioning of two departments: IT Department providing technical support to other company’s departments, and Retail Support Department dealing with the retailers’ requests. The aim was to implement an ITSM standard process approach to servicing.

Solution

Three different ECM systems were thoroughly studied to choose the one that would better meet all the functional criteria, including: document scanning, categorization, archiving and searching; ensuring a unified ECM space for users located in different offices; automating and speeding up the approval processes; enabling integration with Navision, WSS, Project Server 2007. Among two systems meeting all these requirements, the solution with a better price was chosen.

For both IT Department and Retail Support Department, key service providing processes were designed. The department specialists were provided with new detailed regulations and guidelines.

To automate support requests creation and improve requests processing control, a special web portal was designed which unified the company’s specialists requesting for support services. To reduce the amount of standard requests, a knowledge library with a powerful and easy to use search engine was created. The solution enabled users to entrust overdue requests or the requests that had not been properly handled from one support service specialist to another.

The project included automation of typical support service operations such as setting request priority and deadline, appointing specialists responsible for requests in accordance with their availability, informing users of their requests processing, completing requests, assessing request processing quality, etc.

Results

Now when the solution has been successfully implemented, the client company has two fully automated support services. The system is used by around 50 support specialists of IT Department and Retail Support Department.

The new web portal enables company’s specialists from different cities to request for support services, and empowers them with a broad, constantly enlarged, knowledge library. Standard requests now take minutes, instead of hours.

Support services consumers now have an effective tool for controlling the service quality and its compliance with corporate regulations. Diverse reports allow service managers to analyze previous decisions and stay informed of the current situation. The average request response time has been reduced substantially, while request processing is now transparent for both service consumers and support specialists.

General quality of support services has been significantly improved.

The company’s plans for the future are to implement this service management solution in other departments, including logistics department, HR department, retailers auditing department, risk management department, legal department, etc.

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