The challenges of rapid growth As BBAM has experienced rapid and massive growth as a corporation, the demands on the company’s IT support team have seen a commensurate increase. The processes the IT department was using for service and asset management, for troubleshooting ticket management, and for employee onboarding and access provisioning were disjointed and very manual. BBAM was dependent on email, Excel spreadsheets, and manual uploading of forms for all its IT services.
For asset management, even the number of hardware assets could not be known without physical observation. Naturally, with offices all over the world and a limited IT staff, this made change control an especially daunting challenge.
The result was a complex series of separate, siloed elements in workflows involving multiple departments, which was extremely inefficient and time-consuming. The decentralization made it difficult to search the audit trails required for certain control processes, which meant that providing needed audit information was time-consuming and not easily repeatable.
Another weakness in the decentralized processes the IT department depended on was evident in reporting and analytics. All key metrics in the IT department had to be manually compiled for reporting to the leadership team, which took a relatively long time and lacked insights on trends or patterns that might assist with capacity planning (when and why there are spikes in tickets, etc.).

A vendor of digital transformation
Seeking to scale and to build infrastructure to support BBAM’s growth, the IT team decided to embark on a back- office digital transformation journey. They determined that a comprehensive service management solution would best meet its needs. Primarily, they sought to:

• Automate service desk ticketing, problem management, change management, and release management

• Centralize and improve asset tracking and management

• Enable more self-service to ease pressure on the service desk

• Build a common knowledge base for end users and the IT service staff

The vendor discovery process began in May 2018. According to Teresa Eng, Senior Business Technology Analyst at BBAM, SysAid stood out from the competition in both product capabilities and customer support. The solution’s customization and automation capabilities uniquely met the company’s needs, while the assistance and follow- through of the SysAid Professional Services team and Account Managers made taking advantage of those capabilities as easy as possible.

People, process, and technology The IT department decided it would begin promoting a digital culture shift by implementing the SysAid solution for a range of common service management activities:

• Service desk support ticketing

• Personnel offboarding (comprehensive de-provisioning cycle)

• The self-service portal

• Knowledge base

• New hire onboarding (comprehensive provisioning cycle)

• Asset recording, management, retirement lifecycles

• Advanced Reporting

“This project was truly the embodiment of people, process, and technology coming together for this digital transformation.”- Teresa Eng, Senior Business Technology Analyst
To encourage a transition to the self-service portal, the IT team held multiple meetings and role-specific scenario- based training, including the use of templates designed for onboarding. Team sites were created to centralize access to all key informational materials, such as instructional videos from SysAid, process flows, and knowledge base links (allowing effective self-service search).
Overall, it took about a month for all employees to be fully trained. The self-service portal and deployment of the templates provided common ground for user adoption, as the portal is the primary method for submitting tickets.

Streamlining new hire onboarding and employee offboarding
For new hire onboarding and offboarding, SysAid workflows incorporate all credentialing, asset and access provisioning processes, as well as including the relevant managers and HR personnel as needed. This helps to get new hires onboarded quicker and productive from day one. Throughout these processes, all required audit trails are tracked and recorded in SysAid, to ensure full compliance. Asset management
BBAM’s asset management lifecycle is fully managed in SysAid, with both tracking and customizations to manage assets in different locations at any point in time. Knowledge base
SysAid has allowed BBAM to build up a knowledge base to cross-train employees. The knowledge base is open to uploading media and documentation by authorized stakeholders in predefined categories, making independent learning and coaching easier and faster. Customized reports
With SysAid’s flexible reporting capabilities, the IT department is able to produce monthly customized reports on:

• Changes to assets used by the company

• Ticket volumes, indicating how many were opened and where they stand, divided by category

• New hires, divided by department

These reports centralize frequently needed  information for easy access, use and review, as well as providing BBAM new insights into aspects of IT performance.
Communication is key
The BBAM team sees SysAid adoption as dependent on building relationships within the company, listening to personnel in the field and learning what their needs are. To this end, the
IT team send out surveys to gather employee feedback and collect data regarding potential future improvements.
And as suggestions for further streamlining come in from end-users, the IT team leverages SysAid’s flexibility to tweak workflows accordingly.
The results are felt across the board
SysAid went live in October 2018, with the impact rapidly felt across the entire business.
As of 2019, about one quarter of the tickets handled by BBAM’s service desk are for application support, 45% are for desktop support, and the remaining third are for personnel support (e.g., onboarding, offboarding). The process of onboarding has also seen dramatic changes, with the process originally taking up to one month – with a lot of in-house communications and manual steps – to a total of just one or two days.
Teresa said that SysAid has made BBAM’s service management far more efficient, calling the solution “a gamechanger.”
The impact of SysAid among end users includes greater visibility into the progress of IT support and resolution processes, more communication with peers and IT teams, and improved engagement with knowledge base content (organized by issue and incident).
Teresa believes the use of SysAid will continue to pay dividends across the organization, making an even greater impact as BBAM embarks on future growth.
‘Going digital is not the end of a journey, but the beginning’
In the near term, the company will be focusing on greater system integration, more process automations, and additional customized reporting. Looking a little further down the road, BBAM IT leadership will also be examining the potential of SysAid’s BI Analytics module to provide a comprehensive overview of the department’s performance, identify trends, and enable more accurate decision-making.
“We certainly look forward to continue to enhance and build a more robust service management solution for years to come!” concluded Teresa.

From flying solo to flying as a global team With offices around the world, Microdrones did not have  a centralized IT system. Instead, much of the support was siloed, ad-hoc, and segregated by area or industry served. In effect, the IT department did not have an incident management system, nor an asset management system. The leadership team was therefore:

• Unaware of any chronic problems

• Uninformed of which areas required more attention from support

• Unsure of what the workload was like

• Unable to see trends and patterns in end employee requests

Without organized asset management, the IT department lacked a clear idea of the PCs, servers, software, and hardware in use globally by all Microdrones personnel. This was the primary challenge in monitoring asset and software performance across the globe, which cost the company a lot of time and money. “With SysAid, we gained a clear picture of all our company computers and took corrective
actions where necessary. Many employees went from being disappointed with the IT support to being extremely satisfied with our service.”Mircea Pacurariu, Global IT Manager for Microdrones

Getting a clear view during digital transformation As a provider of bleeding edge technology, Microdrones always seeks to integrate technology into all areas of the business, automating operations, and delivering greater value to customers. From an IT standpoint, SysAid was a catalyst in that effort, providing Microdrones with an accurate, global perspective through IT service management (ITSM) with built-in asset management. Mircea Pacurariu, Global IT Manager for Microdrones, summarized his company’s experience with SysAid in just a few select words: “SysAid is exactly what we needed at a pivotal moment in our company’s new digitization strategy and rapid global expansion.” The first step the IT team took with SysAid was to make    a list of the company’s assets worldwide. The resulting snapshot was clear and complete, allowing the company to identify which assets were outdated, which needed replacement, and which needed upgrading. From a  single, central dashboard, the IT team ensured every Microdrones office and business team had what they needed. In addition to the static information, SysAid made continuing global asset monitoring and management possible for the first time. Currently, the Microdrones IT department is using SysAid for managing the company’s servers and workstations across its global digital
infrastructure.

Better asset management for improved performance With SysAid revealing the status, location, and ongoing use of all Microdrones’ digital assets, this led to immediate and sustained improvements in enterprise operations:

• Everybody has updated, working servers and workstations at all times.

• The number of incidents regarding asset performance issues were drastically reduced.

• Wait times for asset upgrades or replacements have been slashed.

• End-user satisfaction significantly improved across the company

Set to roll out more SysAid features In light of the company’s success with SysAid, Microdrones is planning to implement additional features going forward. These include the self-service portal to help end users submit incidents, which will streamline enterprise operations even further. The IT team is also in the process of configuring SysAid’s reporting and analytics for their specific needs, such as gaining insight into asset depreciation trends and the like.
In addition, Microdrones will be extending asset management to include additional network equipment, printers, and cellphones in use by their business and sales teams. More generally, these SysAid upgrades will be part of an ongoing digital transformation. The company will be centralizing management of new equipment, upgrading network-facing firewalls for consistency across all company locations, and more.

Need to change an ‘unsystematic system’ As a business consulting firm, Sintec has established its regional leadership by providing high levels of support, customization, and understanding of their clients. The firm helps its clients transform their operations in a variety of ways, by improving customer service, organizational processes, and technology.
The ‘unsystematic system’ was becoming increasingly unwieldy and inefficient as Sintec was growing in size and scaling its services accordingly. Improvements were clearly needed, but the first steps were discovering what was actually being done and measuring performance. The insight gained would help managers understand what staff are spending most of their time and effort on, highlighting patterns not obvious in day-to-day activity, and which service level commitments were not being met.
The company identified a need to measure performance in several departments – IT, human resources, marketing, design, administration, and commercial support. Primarily, the focus was on ensuring the highest quality back-office support for Sintec’s own workforce. To improve service management for clients, including all areas of service provided to them (not just IT services), the company created the Sintec Delivery Center, which included Sintec Digital and Technology Strategy areas of business.

Time to use SysAid to its full potential
In addition to its more general uses for ticket management in the IT department and wider performance reporting, SysAid is being used in unique ways across several Sintec departments.

The Sintec Delivery Center

• SysAid is integrated into the new center’s services.
• SysAid is used for organizing and tracking maintenance of systems created for clients by Sintec Digital, as part of the services offered by the delivery center.
• Troubleshooting issues and handling incidents as they arise for clients of the Delivery Center, including in their own customer services, is handled through SysAid.

The commercial support team

• All requests from the sales teams for support from internal, back-office teams come through SysAid.
• Commercial support services managed and tracked through SysAid include: creating reports; pipeline changes; creating new leads, opportunities and orders; opening projects; sharing strategic information on an account; and more.
• The commercial support team uses SysAid to independently measure their performance.

The design team

• Design services for Sintec customers – such as creating business presentations, video content, and the like – are managed and tracked through SysAid.
• Design issues and problems are brought to the team’s attention via SysAid.
• The use of SysAid allows the design team to measure their performance.

With the insights evident through SysAid, was able to define SLAs for many business areas of the company – administration, marketing, commercial support, HR, and design. To best share the information, new reports were created in SysAid and old reports were redesigned with what Isaí called “a smooth, easy-to-use interface.”
One of the most important SysAid modules Sintec uses is the self-service portal. The IT support team was impressed with the capability to significantly customize it, to add FAQs, and to embed links to in-house or external websites. For the end user, the portal’s look and feel made it intuitive and simple to use.
With SysAid’s service desk automation, the IT support desk is saving significant time in resolving issues due to automated routing. Each submitted ticket is automatically assigned to the most appropriate people to handle it.

The results of enterprise service management
SysAid is being used as a unified enterprise service management platform in Sintec’s design, commercial support, and IT departments, as well as expanding into HR and administration. This centralization facilitates consistency and coordination across the business as it scales up to meet the needs of a growing client base.
The speed and accuracy of the ticket routing, services, and support Sintec can offer thanks to SysAid has become a value-add, distinguishing Sintec from their competition. The advantages of the self-service portal, for both customerfacing and internal support, are an integral part of presentations to potential Sintec clients.
SysAid’s built-in reporting has helped Sintec identify where to focus attention for systemic improvements. Such insights help guide employee performance coaching, which in turn benefits Sintec’s customers with more effective service.
As Isaí said, “SysAid gives us a window into the performance of all the departments across our organization.”
All of the above advantages gained by leveraging SysAid align fully with Sintec’s broader IT and business strategy.