Challenge
The help desk solution used up to now could no longer meet the challenging requirements with regard to holistic, transparent and largely automated IT service processes. To this end, Mainova required a professional and integrated ITSM overall solution that was also individually configurable and could be operated as SaaS. On the basis of an effective asset management, a comprehensive shop system was able to substantially accelerate the performance of the IT services and support further ITSM disciplines in the medium term.
Solution
The IT processes analyzed and defined in the functional specification were depicted successively by USU IT Service Management. In the process, the integration to an automation platform of Flowster was important. The focus was on the development of incident management and a service catalog on the basis of the CMDB data in order to manage tickets and service requests in a transparent manner, and to be able to manage the provision of standard service offerings in an efficient and cost-effective manner via end-to-end workflows.
Result
With the standardization and automation of the service shop, Mainova has implemented a central component for more ITSM performance and thus also more growth and scalability. In part, through the integrated license and/or approval checks, etc., more than 1,800 various service offerings are drastically reducing the processing times for tens of thousands of orders or tickets. Sophisticated analysis and reporting options permit optimum management.
For us, automation is one of the central topics in order to meet the requirements of our in-house customers and to remove the burden of time-consuming routine tasks on IT employees. In combination with the back-end system of Flowster, the use of the USU solution results in significantly faster processing times, fewer errors and, not least, higher employee satisfaction.
Christina Koch, Head of Service Strategy & Design, Mainova AG
At a glance
The Organization
Mainova AG
Industry
Utility company
Key indicators
- approx. 1,800 service offerings in the shop
- approx. 50,000 request items p.a.
- more than 200,000 IT assets
- approx. 25,000 service requests/incidents p.a.
USU Solution
USU Partner
Flowster Solutions GmbH
Website
www.mainova.de
Service automation as the most important goal
Particularly with companies from the energy sector, the transformation to a modern digital public service provider also brings with it diverse challenges in software and service management. The IT managers at Mainova, one of the largest regional German energy suppliers, attach great importance to efficient, reliable and transparent IT service processes. That is why the group opted to automate them consistently. The goal was to relieve the IT workforce of manual, recurring and error-prone routine tasks and thus provide IT services quickly and in consistently high quality. The requirements for a professional, well-integrated ITSM system that can support all service processes in compliance with ITIL, facilitates flexible adjustments and is also operated as SaaS in Germany were accordingly high. Based on these decision criteria, the choice fell on USU IT Service Management after a comprehensive selection process.
Focus on incident and service request management
The topic of automation is a constant change process for the organization, a process that the employees, however, are open to. The specialist departments were also already involved in the intensive conceptual planning phase at the start of the project in order to define what the processes and the respective authorization concept should look like in detail. The focus area was the implementation of an incident and service request management. For the latter, the aim was to develop a service catalog as a shop system on the basis of a configuration management database. “Our maxim was: Do not request anything without a catalog. However, this also meant that everything from the ergonomic user guidance and the testing and approval processes as well as the portfolio management up to the automated fulfilment has to be right in order to create the necessary acceptance and realize the added value,” says the responsible project manager Christina Koch, explaining the challenges. This also included the connection to the back-end automation system of Flowster. The overall solution can thus cover the automation chain in order to process service requests in fully automated form in the data center.
More IT performance
What frequently required hours or even days in the past can today be done in a few minutes. For instance, a Citrix access or a domain user incl. mail address for the access code to the corporate network, which is automatically generated for new employees via the interface to the HR system. The service shop now has around 1,800 service offerings. Within 36 months since the start of the new solution, approx. 180,000 orders of software and hardware have been triggered and processed in an automated way. Of these, around half were attributed to software allocations that in the past were carried out manually in the SCCM or authorizations. In addition to the cost reduction, positive effects are shown above all in the increase in quality of the processes. In addition, IT teams are alleviated of the burden of routine tasks and can concentrate on innovation and management topics – for instance, analyzing how many faults were reported on a device, how many tickets are assigned to which group or from which service requests Mainova can derive further automation options.
Mainova strives to constantly develop further. In the interest of a continuous improvement process, new ideas and requirements are constantly being recorded, evaluated and successively implemented via a ticket system. Items on the medium-term agenda include the automated provision of cloud resources or the implementation of knowledge management and self-service processes.
In 2021, Mainova also went live with the processes in IT change management and is currently expanding these further. Here, too, automation is still a goal, which the company intends to tackle in 2022.
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