Pharmaceutical and plastics group enhances centralized, itil-based service management
The growth of OBG in recent years has stemmed from its ambitious acquisition of science-led companies. Danny Dunwoody, IT Manager, OBG, oversees group support and operations with a team of five, supporting 300 users across seven UK locations. Recently OBG determined it needed a new service management solution to better support growth and business requirements.
Ivanti service management solution implemented by CTMS
“We were more than impressed with the speed of implementation and the way CTMS managed the project end-to-end, they are clearly expert in their service management field. We logged the time from CTMS’ initial blueprint delivery that detailed our specific requirements to Ivanti Service Manager, to the system being built for Phase One rollout, as being just 4 weeks.”
IT Manager, OGB
Benefits
- Ability to flexibly grow and adapt in line with OBG’s acquisition strategy
- Efficiency improvements of over 30% within eight months
- Improved IT operations with centralized, ITIL-based processes and a cornerstone management platform that enables the business to meet pharmaceutical regulations and allows IT to react in real time
- Improved user satisfaction and support with incident, service request, problem, knowledge management, and change and configuration modules, increasing user productivity
“Facilitate business growth, straight off the bat...”
“Having used a service desk management tool for several years, we entered this evaluation process with a defined vision,” Dunwoody said. “We wanted the IT group to facilitate business growth, straight off the bat, and to shift from being a reactive helpdesk to a proactive, full-service business enabler— recognized internally and externally and help achieve international accreditations such as ISO 20 000 standard.”
Finding a service management platform
To achieve this, Dunwoody first grew the IT team itself, expanding from three to five people, before starting the search for a supporting service management platform that would support centralized, ITIL-based practices, deemed critical in pharmaceutical division due to the high levels of regulation for processes. Dunwoody also determined it was essential that the selected platform accommodate user growth out-of-the-box, integrate with existing software, increase service levels, and offer automated workflows that were customizable to suit different business areas.
OBG’s research included referencing Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for ITIL-based leaders in the field, together with exploring smaller niche solutions. Ivanti made the final shortlist due to excellent peer reviews and enterprise functionality that could be highly tuned—but with an acceptable price tag.
Ivanti® Service Manager
In turn, Ivanti introduced specialist service delivery partner, CTMS, to deliver initial functionality demos of Ivanti® Service Manager, followed with a proof of concept (POC) that convinced OBG that the platform met existing and future business goals.
“Ivanti matched our objectives…”
Dunwoody recalls, “Given we had been exploring solutions for 24 months and were already experienced using a service management solution that offered limited ITIL capabilities, we were pretty confident that we knew what we were looking for and Ivanti matched our objectives, largely out-of-the-box.”
Solutions Delivered Out-of-the-Box in Just Over Six Weeks
Phase 1 commenced with the seamless rollout of Service Manager’s Incident Management. Previously, OBG incidents had been hard to manage and classify, with no ability to quickly detail likely causes, types, responsible systems, escalations, and SLA breaches, or to determine prioritization levels. With Incident Management deployed, OBG can now monitor incoming incidents in real time, using analysis to determine which incidents are caused by underlying issues. This gives the relatively small IT team the insight needed to prioritise and fix incidents and issues.