Solutions

Naumen Service Desk doesn’t focus purely on managing internal IT processes and infrastructure. There are numerous examples where it demonstrated its potential in automating business processes in organizations, which are service-oriented. When carefully applied and properly integrated with existing processes and people, it enables organizations to successfully manage more processes with fewer resources while increasing customer satisfaction and lowering operating costs. Virtually any business, where customer service and support is a critical success factor (service center, telephone or internet service provider, software or hardware distributor) can benefit from implementing Naumen Service Desk. NAUMEN Company presents a number of finished vertical solutions, which are proven to be successfully implemented in Russian companies.

Telecommunications

Companies in telecommunications have a wide audience, including residential customers, business customers, content suppliers, etc. All components of their networks must operate in secured and integrated fashion in order to deliver the services at agreed-upon performance levels.

As the demand on telecommunication services is growing, the number of customer service calls to the telecommunication companies increases in parallel. These service calls are bound up with the issues of service utilization as well as the issues of equipment adjustment and maintenance. In order to keep leading position on the market and to provide high service quality at moderate prices many companies create customer service centers “from scratch” or carry out radical modernization of already existing centers.

Responsibility of the service providers has increased to include not only network management and maintenance plus billing information and customer account life cycle but also data security and service level agreements. Meeting these challenges requires increasing the processing speed of incidents and service calls, analyzing the origins of typical incidents and formalizing the process of information transfer between different departments.

To respond to these needs, service desk staff must be equipped with the tools that are capable to quickly and accurately assess customer needs and solve their problems and to track and link every customer service call or incident as it progresses through the customer support departments.
Naumen Service Desk is proven to successfully overcome all these issues, automating daily activities and workflows of support staff on the basis of ITIL best practices, providing high percentage of incident resolutions on the first line of support and enabling high level of control over the complex incident processing routs, which include possible interaction with external service providers.

A number of Naumen Service Desk features makes this solution especially attractive to telecommunication companies:

Ease of integration with billing systems through SOA for real time automatic access to customer profiles, including details of their contracts and connections. The acquired customer data is used for registering and further processing incoming service calls: new service calls are tied up to the customer, its contract and/or connection, while looking through the history of interaction with that customer.
A build-in interactive wizard “troubleshooter”, which allows the operators of the first line to resolve more than 90% of typical incidents using a set of predetermined instructions, not transferring the incidents to the second line of support;
100% web-interface as a thin client, which results in significant savings while creating workplaces for operators and support engineers and allows to establish geographically distributed support centers.

Naumen Service Desk manages and controls service levels of VIP-customers by means of functional and hierarchical incident escalation. When certain thresholds are reached, there are notifications in place to make sure service level agreements aren’t breached. Additionally, the support staff is equipped with the tools to deal with mass problems, to automatically notify the process participants and to control over the incident resolution deadlines.

Naumen Service Desk tracks the call through its full life cycle which is considered complete when service desk operators revert to the clients and survey their satisfaction level on how the incident was handled. There is an option to use distinct workflows for the incidents of different types.

Naumen Service Desk gives an insight on how well support staff observes its duties in maintaining service level agreements for the clients. For the timely control of support service activities it utilizes built-in OLAP reporting tools. In addition, there are several build–in reports, which make it possible to display the workloads of service desk personnel in various views. In the case of necessity it is possible to integrate the system with practically any external OLAP tool.

With more than 100 installations in telecommunication environment Naumen Service Desk is truly market-leading solution for automating service desk in telecommunication companies across Russia and former Soviet Union republics.

MTU-Intel Company (Brand STREAM)

MTU-Intel is the leading Internet service provider in Moscow. The company provides full range of Internet access services from dial-up to high-speed ADSL broadband access. It also provides hosting, IP telephony services and construction and operation of VPNs, corporate networks, etc. The company owns two brands, Tochka.ru and STREAM, providing Internet access to both corporate subscribers and individuals and aggressively works on expanding the number of services available to its customers.

The Support Service of “MTU-Intel” represents a channel of interaction with 500 thousand customer base of the company. The Service receives more than 5 thousand customer service calls a day, with more than 90% of them being resolved on the first line, and the rest being transferred to the technical experts on the second line. The service calls related to the troubles in telephone wired channels, (rendered by the third party supplier, MTGS), are transferred directly to the MGTS departments, which are dealing with data transfer networks.

The size and complexity of the automation project (more than 450 workplaces were to automate and a number of specific requirements was to implement) prompted MTU-Intel to look for a solution that would support growth and ensure business continuity without increasing the pressure on its Support Service.
Naumen Service Desk met important selection criteria for MTU-Intel, since it was build on the basis of industry best practices such as ITIL, it was scalable and demonstrated its open and flexible architecture and its integration capabilities. Additionally, NAUMEN Company has shown its potential and readiness to implement the solution in short terms.

Thanks to Naumen Service Desk the first line operators of MTU-Intel Support Service now are capable to register and classify incidents and service calls, to resolve typical service calls on the fly with the help of special troubleshooters, to receive the information on incident handling history, to transfer incidents to the system of MGTS trouble tickets and to control their further processing.

Naumen Service Desk equipped MTU-Intel Support Service with the tools to control over the incident resolution deadlines. Automatic vertical and horizontal escalation of incidents and service calls ensures VIP customers are served faster and with better quality. The system enables to work with mass incidents and to use different workflows for the incidents of different types. By interacting with ACP “Amethyst” Naumen Service Desk uses real time data about MTU-Intel customers and actual status of their contracts and services in the process of incident handling.

Retail Chains

An effective service desk is critical for any business with real time operations, including retailing, because hardware or software failures are immediately visible to the customer. The competition in retailing is very high, and these failures in equipment (cash registers, networks, etc) or in corresponding software not only can result in substantial loss of revenue but also can lead to customer dissatisfaction and possible loss of customers to competitors. To ensure constant availability of external IT services, as well as their smooth integration with internal hardware and software, the IT department needs to streamline the daily activities of the IT staff.

Naumen Service Desk helps to speed up IT processes, to improve their quality, to enhance management and control over IT environment so that every help desk call can be responded to and quickly resolved while keeping all activities under control. When deployed and used in retail environment, Naumen Service Desk provides a number of benefits for managing networks, servers, storage, output devices, middleware and applications due to its comprehensive set of useful features, such as:

Common knowledge base, questionnaires and interactive wizards-troubleshooters (allow to resolve nearly 90% of service calls by help desk operators, on the first line of help desk);
The IT services catalogue and service level agreements (allow to automatically range service calls and to assign them to available resources according to call priorities);
Seamless integration with IP call center solution Naumen Phone (helps help desk operators to record and automatically register user service calls when taking phone calls and to automatically notify users through IVR when mass disruption occurs);
Build-in reporting capabilities and flexible report generator (provides IT managers with reports that demonstrate IT staff performance and display measures in achieving IT service-quality levels).

When Naumen Service Desk is deployed in retailing, it maximizes the utilization of available resources and reduces the number of incidents and downtimes. By increasing transparency of the IT operations, it enables to proactively response to any situation, to improve business performance, and—above all— to reduce the costs of the IT operations.

Victoria Group (retail chains “Dyoshevo”, “Kvartal”)

«Victoria» Group is one of the leading retailers in Russia. In 2005, publishing house «Kommersant» ranked the holding 14th among top 50 Russian retailers with total number of employees over 12 000, annual turnover exceeding $607 million and annual growth rate of 55%. The holding controls retail chains of a variety of formats, offering its customers a high quality service while keeping affordable prices.

The company owns a chain of convenience stores «next-to-home»- «Kvartal», a chain of discounters «Dyoshevo» and a chain of supermarkets «Victoria». In addition, the company operates one cash-and-carry store in Kaliningrad. The stores are widely distributed geographically with locations in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Vladimir, Ulyanovsk. Currently, the company strengthens positions in the cities of its presence, as well as explores new regions with total number of stores exceeding 150.

Possessing heterogeneous and complex IT infrastructure, which was embracing servers, networks, user workstations, sales and office equipment in combination with ERP system Axapta Retail, the IT department of holding experienced many of the pains that typically afflict IT systems of growing organizations. The holding has grown extremely quickly and expected the growth to continue.

Rapidly-growing IT systems of the holding caused the need to increase IT staff productivity, shorten response time, mean time to repair, and to reduce the time and effort needed to diagnose and fix common problems. Additionally, it was necessary to increase user productivity by increasing network and application availability and reducing waiting time for help desk support or other IT administrative tasks. The holding decided to establish a single entry point for registering and managing user service calls, thus ensuring the right people work on the right issues at the right time.

With its capabilities for managing crucial support and service processes, Naumen Service Desk was the right solution for the holding, enabling effective management of IT staff time while simultaneously improving the quality of service and support to users. The workstations of the holding help desk operators and support engineers were connected to Naumen Service Desk, thus uniting them with a common purpose to deliver high quality services and providing them with the following set of tools:

Registering incidents and classifying them according to IT service types;
Assigning tasks to IT professionals or IT specialist groups and controlling tasks execution;
Assigning deadlines for the incident resolution and controlling them;
Logging events occurred with incidents and service calls for proper conflict resolution;
Investigating the incident origin and their influence on IT services;
Finding typical solutions for frequent problems, useful for both IT personnel and business users.

A comprehensive set of IT services and a set of rules to deal with service level agreements were identified and worked out in the course of deployment project. When registering an incident or a service call, they were used to set up incident and service call priorities and deadlines. In addition, Naumen Service Desk was responsible for tracking and controlling the work orders, which were assigned to technicians from the IT operation departments.

Currently, Naumen Service Desk is used for internal service calls dealing with hardware and software applications for the entire holding. Service calls from users seeking help desk support are placed by phone and are registered by help desk operators whose workstations are equipped with IP software phones Naumen SoftPhone. An IP call center solution Naumen Phone is responsible for performing call–related tasks, such as dispatching incoming calls, balancing operator load, collecting call center statistics.

Banking and Insurance

Russian financial institutions are pioneering in using state-of-the-art IT solutions to perform critical business tasks in order to take advantage brought by newer technologies. Having built modern and highly technological business divisions, banking executives discovered the need to align delivery of IT services with business processes, business requirements and customer demand. Low quality and unstable IT services may considerably increase the bank’s operational risks, decrease the bank’s market value and customer loyalty.

One of the main obstacles in providing high quality IT services for crucial bank business processes is ineffective IT management. Often, the bank’s IT department consists of functionally separated groups of IT professionals. Even though they are highly skillful, there are no common standards, no cross-functional cooperation, no rules and procedures, which IT staff could follow to meet their obligations and complete their tasks. Additionally, the bank’s executives must have a background for informed decision making about current IT environment, about what IT budgets are to be approved and what investments into the bank’s IT infrastructure are to be made.

Implementing Naumen Service Desk helps the bank’s IT departments to provide IT services that are cost-effective, aligned with the needs of business and delivered in a transparent way:

To establish a single entry point for the bank’s business users service calls, no matter what the service call subject is;
To create a library of common solutions for frequent problems, useful for both IT personnel and business users;
To ensure regular and thorough documenting of incident registration and resolution;
To design and adopt regulations and to issue a set of directives that are feasible and targeted to centralized management of business-critical IT services and applications;
To launch early response tools on incidents, hardware of software malfunctioning or IT service quality deterioration;
To obtain a comprehensive view on incidents and their influence on IT services for business users from various departments and branch offices;
To reduce the number of tasks being executed in emergency, to shorten the time of critical situation resolution, to improve the response at the time of peak load;
To launch IT service availability tools for business-critical processes through working up circuit solutions of typical problems;
To provide an estimate on how well IT infrastructure is performing and how well IT staff members meet their commitments.

Naumen Service Desk is capable to provide a single information framework for all IT staff involved in delivering IT services and managing IT infrastructure across entire organization. It automates and streamlines IT staff workflows and reduces the overall time required to deliver IT-based services to business users.

By integrating with database monitoring systems, such as Oracle Enterprise Manager, with hardware inventory and operation management systems, such as Microsoft SMS/MOM or LANDesk, with network management systems, such as Cisco Works, Naumen Service Desk enables collecting, working up and making available information about bank’s IT infrastructure and maintaining the IT infrastructure as well. Whether it is a workstation in the branch or in the head office, an ATM, an Internet server or a network switch, a camera or a monitor in the bank’s security, Naumen Service Desk keeps track of its current state, its configuration and incidents, happened with it.

SKB-bank

Correlating business process performance with performance of its IT services, SKB-bank started an ITIL–based automation of the bank’s IT department in order to increase IT service up-time and reduce costs associated with routine and repetitive tasks of supporting the bank’s business users.

One of the key challenges met by the bank’s IT department was rapid bank expansion through establishing an extensive network of branch offices. The process of expansion put an additional pressure on overloaded IT staff. On the one hand, there was a need to free IT staff for focusing on business critical higher value-added IT services. On the other hand, there was a need to maintain identical level of IT service quality and support for the business users in newly opened branch offices.

Another key challenge faced by the bank’s IT department was increasing number of the new banking products coupled with implementation of new IT systems. Necessity of rendering quick and effective help to business users of both legacy and newly implemented systems forced the bank to seek for an automation tools for effective IT service management.

By using Naumen Service Desk the day-to-day activities of the bank’s IT department, especially the help desk service became centrally and transparently managed:

The IT management policies, quality metrics and measures, monitoring and control processes were established and implemented according to ITIL best practices;
A clear set of IT services that are important from a combined IT/business perspective or that directly support key business processes, was identified;
Service level agreements (SLA) that specify which IT services are to be delivered to business users as well as service quality (level of availability), were used.

As a result of the project implementation, help desk first-line operators resolve more user requests on their own, releasing specialists for more complex tasks requiring higher technical skills. A number of build-in reports provide IT management with a set of tools for analyzing issues in delivering IT services for the bank’s business users and real-time monitoring of them. The help-desk statistics is groundwork for further IT service quality improvement by enabling quantitative estimate of each IT staff member performance.

Manufacturing

The IT environment in organizations is typically complex and heterogeneous. As the organizations grow, their IT landscape is growing, their IT management is becoming more complex, and quality of IT operations and services doesn’t meet the requirements of internal and external IT customers. When the costs of IT operations and maintenance are too high, the IT departments and the business managers feel the need of comprehensive and timely information about IT processes and IT infrastructure.

Naumen Service Desk is an integrated solution that helps to quickly and accurately assess IT customer needs and to solve their problems. When using Naumen Service Desk, an IT department of an organization is equipped with a tool that enables, at least, the following:

To establish a single entry point for registering and resolving incidents and users’ service calls;
To create an maintain a common knowledge base for simplifying resolution of similar or related service calls in the future;
To ensure timely notification of users regarding closuring their service calls or another important actions;
To generate flexible, timely, and accurate reports that demonstrate whether IT service-quality levels are being met;
To define, prioritize and schedule tasks and jobs, and to control their fulfillment.

Integration of Naumen Service Desk with IP call center solution Naumen Phone empowers help desk operators, who take user service calls by phone. When a user is calling help desk, an operator sees user data, such as name, position, division, etc., BEFORE taking the user’s phone call. In addition, entire history of the user’s previous service calls as well as entire set of IT services, delivered to the user, is shown to the help desk operator.

A combination of common knowledge base, questionnaires and interactive solution search wizards (troubleshooters) enables storing information about typical incidents and making it available. In addition to flexible reporting system of Naumen Service Desk, its build-in report generator enables IT departments to provide flexible, timely, and accurate reports that demonstrate actual levels of IT service quality. Based on this information, it is possible to increase transparency, to identify and trigger optimization activities and to make effective day-by-day decisions.

Naumen Service Desk allows better communication among people and processes. Both IT department and business divisions get a transparent view on the entire set of IT processes. Usually, the available IT budgets remain limited, and the IT director gets a background for requesting the IT budgets as well as for planning investments into the IT infrastructure.

By implementing Naumen Service Desk the IT department as a whole is able to better manage all tasks and requirements, to reduce manual workloads, to keep all activities under control, to speed up IT processes and to improve quality.

«KRKA-Rus» Company

Slovenian company KRKA is one of the top generic pharmaceutical companies in Europe, focusing mainly on developing its own high quality generic drugs with added value. The company’s products are marketed under their own brand name and are sold in more then 70 countries worldwide.

«KRKA-Rus» Company, a KRKA subsidiary, runs a state-of-the-art plant, which is making solid dosage forms and which was constructed to have a high level of automation and computer controlled processes. The production process at the plant is fully planned, controlled and monitored by a computer system that ensures GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) environment through controlling temperature, humidity, air pressure and direction of flows.

As the IT service workload was growing there emerged the need for tracking users’ service calls, analyzing service call’s statistics and controlling the incident resolution. The managers of the plant’s IT department evaluated the situation and decided to implement a process approach for managing IT services with appropriate tools.

In addition to comprehensive set of IT services a set of pre-defined rules to deal with service level agreements was identified, worked out and used to set deadlines for incidents and service calls.

As a result of Naumen Service Desk deployment the help desk operations significantly improved with both IT department managers and IT staff being able:

To classify and track incidents and service calls from initiation through their full life cycle;
To initiate and register daily work orders for help desk staff and to control their fulfillment;
To automatically prioritize incidents and service calls and to control their deadlines;
To analyze the sources of hardware and software failures and clearly recognize common problems;
To generate easy-to-understand reports that provide an insight on incident distribution by IT services, end users and IT professionals.

The project resulted in raising quality of IT service desk operations and providing the IT department with tools based on international best practices. Another benefit of Naumen Service Desk implementation was improved level of communications between end users and IT personnel. The end users could place service calls via the Web interface as well as use it to view their call statuses. It is also freeing up the help desk staff from answering a lot of calls which is one of the big contributors to efficiency gains.

Business Centers

Modern business center provides its customers not only with office premises rent and telecommunication services but also with housing and administrative services including premises cleaning, technical maintenance of the office equipment and office security. When the number of customers is growing, there appears a necessity to handle all requests to the center’s administration office (AO) and to improve the customer service quality. Naumen Service Desk offers the automation tools to deal with requests, troubles, jobs and service quality management. By using Naumen Service Desk the AO executives can benefit from:

Reducing the time expenditures for one time service fulfillment;
Solving the customer problems in a timely fashion;
Controlling the employees workload more effectively;
Improving the billing of provided services.

Personnel can access the system by means of PDA-tools through the special interface. The thorough reporting of all AO staff operational activities is available both to the business-center executives and to the customers themselves through the intranet portal.

Government (Single Window)

The principles of creating and operating the “Single Window” services are closely related to similar requirements of the IT-infrastructure management. The tasks settled by the governmental and public organizations are being successfully solved in commercial environments, where profit depends on the quality of the service provided. The best practices have been already described in ITIL/ITSM procedures, and Naumen Service Desk acts as an automation tool to manage the processes.

In the framework of operating a “Single Window” Naumen Service Desk is capable to solve the following tasks:

Providing a single contact point between the citizens and the regional state/municipal organizations;
Ensuring high quality and timely processing of the citizens’ requests taking into account the request priorities. The request priority reflects its urgency and importance for a citizen, with distinct deadlines of the request handling for each priority;
Processing the citizens’ requests with unified algorithms: all typical requests have standard approval routs, and the processing times are controlled at every stage.
Transparently operating a “Single Window”, from the one hand enabling the regional administration to control the functioning of all authorities on-the-fly, and enabling the citizens to assess the operation of regional administration and all the subordinate structures, from the other.

Naumen Service Desk is the optimal solution for automating the “Single Window” operation, when considering a large number of the citizens’ requests, a variety of provided services and the necessity of integrating different applications, which are used in authorities, into united system. Not the least important factor is that the system was developed on the basis of Open Source software platform Naumen Kernel and is accompanied with full technical support at many locations.

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