“OIA Global designs build and deliver market-leading Supply Chain Commerce Solutions that drive top-line growth by converging front-end sales with back-end supply chain execution and efficiency. It combines software, platform technology, and unmatched experience to help its customers around the world adapt to the challenges of the omnichannel marketplace. OIA Global has a global presence in eleven offices with about 2,700 employees and partners on nearly every continent.”
With three different service desk teams, across three different sites (Europe, US, and Asia), in three different time zones, OIA Global wanted to link multiple sites via a central server to manage their help desk tickets in real-time. Performing help desk activities across geographies and time zones under the company’s distributed help desk model simply slowed down the support process. Another important challenge was incident categorization. OIA Global has a large and global customer base, and the company wanted a proper system to categorize and keep track of the tickets, automate and assign tickets to specific agents, prioritize tickets, and keep the service desk organized. The lack of effective incident management caused productivity issues and some tickets to fall through the cracks. Change management was a separate but no less intensive challenge for OIA Global. Some of the company’s upgrades, adds, and changes resulted in chaos in the absence of proper change workflows.
Tikting , the ITSM solution from ITDEVTECH, was demoed back in 2008 to OIA Global. e company wound up purchasing it in February 2009 with an initial investment of 120 tech licenses, replacing a locally developed application with limited functionality – in other words, a bare-bones tool. Soon after joining OIA Global in 2011, Arnold, the service desk manager, found that the full potential of Tikting remained to be tapped. He decided to have a fresh start with an upgrade to the latest version. He set out to ITDEVTECH’s office in Austin, Texas to learn the ins and outs of Tikting. At ITDEVTECH, Arnold worked with a technical specialist to fully understand the product. By the end of the week, he was fluent with Tikting. With continued assistance, Arnold led his organization to successfully upgrade the solution. Soon enough, OIA Global could take advantage of the seamless upgrades, hotfixes, major releases, and other developments of the tool that had been missed so far.
When Arnold and his team leveraged the tool, they learned that they had better visibility into every issue across their US, UK, and Asia sites, helping them to stay on top of the tickets, the news, and announcements. They are also able to easily shift tickets amongst the three groups as needed. The visibility and ticket sharing features are things that OIA Global finds attractive about Tikting as it helps ensure that the company’s global workforce can collaborate at the speed of business and offer an unhindered support experience to its customers.
Being a global organization, OIA Global leaves no stone unturned to ensure proper ticket management. That means every step in the lifecycle of an incident is managed to perfection including tracking and reporting. OIA Global uses Tikting ’s best-in-class Integrated Incident Management module to achieve this perfection not just on sunny days but also when the ticket load is high.
Here’s a real-world example from OIA Global: Just last year, its service desk team deployed Lync using System Center as a global project. Soon after the deployment, the service desk got slammed with an influx of calls as some of the company’s devices did not receive the Lync package due to defective machines, remote users, and other reasons. Using Tikting incident management, OIA Global’s service desk team created a separate group for the Lync tickets. The team then created categories, sub-categories, and items that were related to Lync issues; and they placed those tickets in separate buckets to be automatically assigned to a specific group to work on. This well-defined categorization of the Lync-related incidents helped the team search for recurring incidents, prioritize the Lync tickets, automatically route the tickets, input the solutions into a knowledge base, and greatly improve the clarity and granularity of the report data.
OIA Global rolled out a change management process in 2013. Using the Tikting change management module, Arnold and his service desk team set up change workflows. They have a change advisory board for both the technicians and the business stakeholders to approve the requested changes, assist in the assessment and prioritization of the changes, and review changes for consistency with company policy. A monthly maintenance window also allows Arnold’s team to perform these changes. With proper change management in place, OIA Global is now able to stop any unplanned service interruptions, the change processes are more streamlined, the infrastructure is more stable, and the processes are more amiable to the company’s business, enabling it to run smoothly.
OIA Global’s favorite feature in Tikting is the business rules used to target priority automatically assign tickets that rule out particular incidents by matching the criteria set and notify the right technicians on those particular tickets. The team also creates auto-response templates that point the end users to self-help solutions for particular tickets.
For example, when a server or a high availability system goes down, the team has alerts injected into the system that automatically create, prioritize, categorize the ticket and notify the right technician. Another instance of a business rule is to automatically create tickets when a virus is received. The team has set up two levels of virus alerts – single and repeated. Once these alerts are triggered, Tikting automatically creates a ticket and assigns it to the service desk. The service desk gets the virus down without affecting the systems or the network.
The Tikting upgrade has revolutionized the way IT support works in OIA Global. Arnold and his team love how the most efficient their support process has become. Setting up separate sites allows great flexibility within the tool. Business rules help them keep out the drivel and make sure that only the relevant or priority tickets get attention. Categorization of incidents helped speed up ticket resolution; and in under a month, there was increased productivity across all three sites. And as Arnold sums it up in his own words, “Tikting has been a great decision both functionally and financially. I’m looking forward to the updates and changes that may be coming out in the future.”
“Tikting has been a great decision both functionally and financially. I’m looking forward to the updates and changes that may be coming out in the future. says Arnold.”
