Global service delivery manager at ERM
ServiceDesk Plus
Founded in the UK in 1971, ERM is a global leader in providing environmental, health, safety, risk, social consulting services, and sustainability related services. It works with some of the world's leading companies in oil and gas, mining and metals, power, manufacturing and pharmaceutical, chemical, and technology, media and telecommunications sectors. ERM helps its customers understand business impacts on society and the environment, and provides innovative solutions that enable its customers to balance business objectives and sustainability.
"Analytics Plus is the extra member of the team that takes up the task of consolidating data and presenting information, enabling people to make faster, better decisions. It helps our teams know more about their performance, and the quality of services they provide. It has helped us become more mature in our IT operations."
The ERM labor force includes more than 5,500 people working with more than 160 branch offices in 40 countries. Each office has access to ERM's IT workforce with service desk staff and several support groups, including infrastructure, software, and unified communication services located and spread across the regions ERM is present.
ERM IT required an analytics solution that could weave together data from all its locations and IT Support staff and provide a unified view of the organization's IT Service Delivery. ERM also desired a granular display of the different demands and support requirements of its people, offices, regions and support groups, so it could create goals and targets, both at the organization level and the support group level.
Chris McCarthy, Global service delivery manager at ERM, says, "We wanted to track the success of our global IT support as well as individual teams and team members. For example, at the regional level, we wanted to understand the type, nature, and pattern of support requests coming in so that we can train our support team, and ensure we're adequately staffed to tackle incoming request loads. Be that through the understanding of demand patterns or capacity to support demand loads."
ERM chose Analytics Plus, ManageEngine's flagship IT analytics application, because the ERM IT team was impressed with the solution's ability to integrate seamlessly with other ManageEngine applications, particularly Service Desk Plus.
McCarthy adds, "We didn't want to export data out of our help desk and dig through it ourselves for answers. We wanted an integrated analytics solution that works with ServiceDesk Plus right out of the box. Analytics Plus fit the bill perfectly. It is also so easy to use that I started working with Analytics Plus right away, with no official training."
"With Analytics Plus we can see trends, patterns, and changes in our data. This helps us turn data into information which we can act on," McCarthy says.
Soon after deploying Analytics Plus, ERM was able to gain an overarching view of its IT operations, all from a single console. The ERM IT team was able to compare regional performances, and see how operations stacked up against its core KPIs in real time.
"Analytics Plus made it easy for us to view IT data from different countries and regions. We no longer had to rely on regional staff to create reports or present them in meetings. We created multiple dashboards for each IT function and region, and we were able to measure performance granularly as well as globally. Additionally, these dashboards would be updated with live data every hour, so anytime we looked up a dashboard, the data was live, fresh, and up-to-date," McCarthy noted.
Using Analytics Plus, ERM was able to gain visibility into all its regional offices and support groups. This enabled the IT team to streamline its service processes, cut down backlogs, and reduce time taken to resolve tickets without compromising customer satisfaction
McCarthy notes, "After using Analytics Plus, we were able to identify service areas that tend to pile up tickets and clear through it. This helped us reduce our backlog to just 1,000 tickets. Additionally, we were able to resolve about 70 percent of our tickets on the same day. Ultimately, these improvements helped us increase our customer satisfaction scores by seven percent, from 90 percent to 97 percent."
McCarthy adds, "With Analytics Plus, we don't have to create multiple reports for different teams and different regional offices. A single report can be filtered and shared with our teams. This has reduced the number of reports we need to manage, and also the size of our data sets."
Some of the features that helped ERM love Analytics Plus are the ability to set up email schedules to share reports and dashboards with a wide audience base, apply user filters to customize reports to suit the audience, and create reports and dashboards on the fly.
Technical support is another area where Analytics Plus won ERM over. McCarthy notes, "Analytics Plus' technical support is fantastic. Anytime we need report customization or troubleshooting, the support team sweeps in and helps us out."
Analytics Plus is a business intelligence and IT analytics tool that enables organizations to visualize their IT data from several IT applications and monitoring tools. With the combined capabilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, Analytics Plus' AI assistant Zia responds to voice and text-based questions with rich visualizations that drastically reduce report building time and enable organizations to make faster, data-driven decisions. Additionally, Analytics Plus offers predictive analytical capabilities, contextual collaboration, and real-time data alerts based on threshold violations.
