Business Overview
Aggreko began their journey in the Netherlands in 1962, providing diesel generators to heat crops and quickly grew to become a globally recognised brand, delivering power,temperature control and energy services to businesses and communities around the world.
Aggreko expanded to the UK in the 1970s and it immediately faced the challenge of providing reliable energy to a country that suffered from an unreliable grid, resulting in frequent blackouts.. Being the only company with means to meet the demands, Aggreko grew quickly.
Fast forward 40 years and Aggreko have forged a global reputation for reliability, expertise and mobile, modular equipment. The Scottish-based company handles the world’s largest events and has enjoyed a 30 year partnership with the Olympics, powered the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, many live performances across all continents, delivered a 200 MW power supply to Japan in the wake of a tsunami and supported the relief efforts of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. All of these successes were accomplished while focusing and continuously developing their technology to supply cleaner, quieter and efficient temperature and power control to the world.
So, how did Aggreko come to partner with acrinax?
Damian Bowen and Emma Faller of acrinax executed a piece of consultancy to look at improvement opportunities within the IT department.
Aggreko had recently purchased a new IT service management tool and acrinax recommended they implement this as a priority to realise fast improvements through better process management and improved automation. The expertise and knowledge Damian and Emma showcased immediately caught the attention of Aggreko and they wanted to combine their expertise.
The Challenge
Aggreko had been users of LANDesk for the previous 10 years, but the product had become end of life and the business had organically grown to a point where the data was becoming confusing.
The following challenges were identified:
. Over 3000 categories to log tickets
. 50% of tickets logged against 30 categories
. Limited to no use of the self-service portal
. No linkage between ITSM product, asset management and customer satisfaction management.
. 6,000 service users
. Approximately 80,000 tickets annually
. Over 80% of contacts by email
. No incident or request module segregation
. Multiple remote Service Desk teams.
With service desks in Glasgow, Dubai, North America and Latin America; Aggreko were faced with challenges collaborating between the teams. However, the teams knew they needed to overcome these obstacles and provide a modern, efficient service to their customers.
Aggreko had already purchased an IT service management tool, although it hadn’t been implemented. Getting agreement from business stakeholders and other IT teams was another hurdle to overcome.
The Solution
Aggreko considered their options carefully before deciding on the right technology, engaging with consultants to help them deploy the project correctly and looking for service desk improvement opportunities.
They could have stayed with their current provider and simply upgraded the LANDesk system. However, this wasn’t in line with the cloud-first strategy.
Microsoft Service Desk was an option considered, although the Gartner magic quadrant highlighted the platform wasn’t going to receive the innovation required to satisfy Aggreko’s need’s fully.
Market leaders, ServiceNow have a very powerful platform and were placed in the top position of the Gartner magic quadrant.
Ivanti Service Manager offered the high levels of innovation, positioned in the top right corner on the Gartner magic quadrant, aligned with the cloud first requirements, offering automation and integration with their access and identity software.
Having dealt with Ivanti for many years, Aggreko had already built a good relationship and they felt the whole package was best suited for them..
A project was devised to deploy Ivanti Service Manager quickly to deliver maximum benefits as rapidly as possible. Agile day to day operations and long-term strategic objectives enabled Aggreko to transform the Service Desks capabilities into valued business enablers.
The Outcome
Streamline, automate, collect effective data and evolve.
. Reduced categories by 90%
. Quality ticket management
. A channel shift in customer engagement through the introduction of a new self-service portal
. Create an ever-evolving knowledge base
. Implementation of our request management module
. Delegate work to the correct agent immediately
. Work towards integrating Ivanti Service Manager with a new Identity and Access management tool – automating joiners and leavers’ process.
. Reduce workload and improve team morale
. Work towards integrating the asset management tool with Ivanti Service Manager
. Integrate “Happy Signals” to improve customer experience.
Automating processes on the Service Desk was one of the main ambitions of Aggreko, to free up agents’ time and allow them to work on higher value activities. This will ultimately reduce the workload on the desk and increase team morale.
A self-service portal had been in place for a few years, although uptake had been relatively poor. A channel shift programme would allow Aggreko to take advantage of improved workflow, automation and free up Service Desk resources. During July, 57 incidents were logged against the portal, compared to 130 in the first week of deployment.
Ivanti also integrated seamlessly with Cireson Asset Management and Happy Signals (a platform used to measure customer experience), unifying IT systems.
The Commitment
To implement an innovative, automated service desk required commitment from the whole business. Aggreko wanted to evolve the Service Desk with maximum collaboration, and this requires engagement from Stakeholders and other teams within Aggreko.
Support was in abundance; the end users were more than willing to come forward in offering their opinions to develop a self-service portal with ease of use and increased business benefits. The combined knowledge and experience of everyone involved enabled the Service Desk team to build the perfect picture. This creates a solution that best fits everybody’s requirements and future proofs the IT service management capabilities to meet the ever-changing business demands.
From the start this was a highly collaborative process and the team ran many process mapping events. This allowed the process lead to obtain agreements from stakeholders and other internal IT support teams with regards to new improved processes.
Designing the portal incorporated the help of business stakeholders in conjunction with the Aggreko comms team. This allowed Aggreko to build a self-service portal that everybody was happy and engaged with and in line with the agreed communications templates and guidelines.
The Future
The consultant helped the team build a road map for Aggreko’s future phases of the Ivanti Service Manager life cycle, to provide even more benefits and use the tools full capabilities. In the future it would be possible to remove the email function, moving entirely to the Self-Service Portal.
In order to improve automation, the Ivanti product will be integrated with their access and identity platform from Microsoft, further aligning with a clean IT architecture.
acrinax
acrinax is extremely devoted in delivering best in class technology, consultation, IT deployment & 24/7 technical support with its clients. From start to finish and beyond, we support your business with the training and development of your platform, so you become self-sufficient in managing your IT systems.
Quote from Tony Deeb (Service Delivery Manager at Aggreko)
“The knowledge and experience of the team at acrinax allowed us to plan and execute this hugely successful project with minimal disruption. We are now realising improvements in efficiency, reporting and in measuring customer satisfaction. I plan to engage with acrinax on future improvement initiatives.”
