Service Management Leads Blue Crystal Into New Age of Efficiency Founded in 2004, Blue Crystal Solutions provides cloud, database, middleware and application services to 40 active clients in a range of industries, including utilities, education, state government and defence.

“The business has grown from two owners seizing an opportunity to provide database administration services to customers in Adelaide, South Australia, to a practise of 35 people with a broad portfolio of capabilities,” says Mark O’Loughlin, General Manager, Blue Crystal Solutions. “These include industry specialisations such as application integration with the Australian Electricity Market Operator.” The business has offices in South Australia and Victoria, and has expanded its services to include cloud readiness, architecture, migration and support, as well as data management.

Replicating information between systems prompts rethinkBlue Crystal Solutions initially captured consultants’ time on technology projects for customers on spreadsheets. The maturing business then adopted a freeware product to capture time and tasks, and a separate freeware tool to manage support tickets, as well as a third-party Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. “These were our core systems,” says O’Loughlin. “However, as we grew, we were replicating information between our timesheet, CRM, support tickets and invoice management systems. In addition, the ticketing system was difficult to search, making it cumbersome for the business to track down historic events.”

These impediments eventually persuaded O’Loughlin to review the consultancy’s approach to service management. “I was particularly passionate about a single source of truth,” he says. “Lack of integration and consistency between systems meant versions of customer contact details not only resided in the timesheet and ticket management systems, but in our document management, customer relationship management, office productivity and accounting systems. Our partner and employee details were also replicated across multiple systems.”

In some cases, these details would be updated in one or two systems, but not all, meaning consultants and back-office team members could be working from different versions of information about the same areas.

“What I wanted to do was consolidate our systems to a single ITIL best practice framework and source of truth that our employees could use to obtain all of the information relevant to a particular customer or prospect,” says O’Loughlin.

Headquarters

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Industry

IT consulting

Geographies

Australia-wide

Highlights

IT consulting firm rolls out ITIL framework and processes, delivers customer service portal, implements cultural change and introduces consistent SLA and customer satisfaction measurements with ServiceNow.

“The ServiceNow support team has been very engaging and very supportive and it’s certainly a relationship I am very comfortable with as we move into the future.”” —Mark O’Loughlin, General Manager, Blue Crystal Solutions

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Case Study

“We can now measure service level agreements and response times far better than previously. We have streamlined our processes and become considerably more efficient by undertaking measures such as integrating timesheets and ticketing through ServiceNow.”

ServiceNow closest to meeting 150 requirementsBlue Crystal Solutions started the process of deploying a new service management system by gathering customer and internal requirements. The business ended up with a list of nearly 150 requirements related to integration, data management and processes, and used these to establish criteria for selecting a system. Blue Crystal Solutions then went to tender and obtained responses from nine prospective suppliers. The consultancy then narrowed these to a shortlist of four potential vendors based on the performance of their service management systems in automating and managing timesheet, ticketing, customer relationship management, finance, billing and projects.

“ServiceNow provided the best match to our requirements, so that was the supplier we went with,” says O’Loughlin. “Our evaluation found that ServiceNow’s software could scale to support our growth; was feature-rich with a user-friendly interface; that our in-house technical team could easily customise the software; and that ServiceNow provided a single solution that could address all our key business requirements. We realised we could expand our usage to areas such as asset tracking, which we eventually rolled out in the first phase”.

Blue Crystal Solutions then engaged UXC Keystone to deploy ServiceNow. UXC Keystone allocated a dedicated project manager to ensure the work was completed smoothly. “We delivered the project in phases in an approach that reflected the resources we could afford to deploy,” says O’Loughlin,

The consultancy completed the initial baseline configuration of ServiceNow in late 2014, and subsequently rolled out ServiceNow functionality across several phases, including CRM in January 2015 to manage customer data and sales opportunities, asset management in February 2015 to control and manage internal assets, and service management –including incident, request and problem management–in May 2015.

Blue Crystal Solutions started phase two of the project in September 2015 and implemented time recording against tickets and projects and billing extracts. The business deployed a customer self-service portal the following month.

Other functions implemented in January to July 2016 included contract management, customer satisfaction feedback and release management.

The business is now using ServiceNow to manage critical tasks such as customer contract expiry and renewals, billing and the automation of ITIL aligned service delivery workflows such as incident, request and problem resolution. “We have also integrated our proprietary database monitoring and alerts system, BlueDiamond, into ServiceNow so we can integrate our customer business reporting seamlessly and provide greater detail,” says O’Loughlin.

Blue Crystal realises extensive cultural change

Deploying ServiceNow has enabled Blue Crystal Solutions to implement its new ITIL compliant processes and workflows efficiently, enabling extensive cultural change within the business. “We can now measure service level agreements, response times and customer satisfaction far better than previously” says O’Loughlin. “We have also streamlined our processes and become considerably more efficient by undertaking measures such as integrating timesheets and ticketing through to our billing with our ServiceNow implementation.”

The cultural change the business aimed to realise through ServiceNow complemented a project to certify all Blue Crystal Solutions employees to an ITIL framework for delivery of IT services, and to move them to ITIL-compliant processes. “We didn’t want to implement ServiceNow running our old processes and then have to change them to new processes at a later date,” says O’Loughlin. “So we started to implement ITIL processes before we deployed ServiceNow, then implemented ServiceNow with the new ITIL processes.”

Case Study

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Business value:

Creating a customer portalDespite the complexities of deploying the tool at the same time as familiarising its team with the process changes, O’Loughlin is extremely pleased with the outcome. “One of the things we were unable to achieve when using freeware was a portal that enabled customers to check the status of their interactions with Blue Crystal Solutions,” he says. “Individuals within businesses that used us could only see the tickets that they had raised. So if multiple people within those businesses were raising tickets for the same issue or different problems they could not see what others were doing, potentially leading to duplication and inefficiency.” Now, Blue Crystal Solutions is operating a portal that enables customers to view all their interactions with the business, improving service levels and maximising the efficiencies in resolving support issues.

Metrics and next stepsBlue Crystal Solutions’ historic reporting had been evolving slowly on an on-demand basis using a range of manually-generated metrics. Its customer engagements typically did not include service level agreement (SLA) discussions. However, SLAs became more relevant to Blue Crystal Solutions and its customers as the business matured. “Implementing ServiceNow enabled us to develop a range of standard internal SLA measures to create a baseline against we can benchmark our performance,” O’Loughlin says. “Since we implemented ServiceNow, our internal measures for resolving problems and resolution times indicate we are achieving a 94.5 percent success rate against targets.

“With ServiceNow we are improving our data collection and analysis methods and have an increased focus on performance measurement,” he adds. “We are now measuring customer satisfaction levels using feedback mechanisms on our incidents and request completion.”

Blue Crystal Solutions believes it has reduced the number of service desk calls and customer-specific ticket reporting, while its streamlined billing process has delivered savings of about three hours per month and improved invoice accuracy. O’Loughlin also estimates that productivity improvements achieved through reduced manual effort equate to about one hour per week for each worker, which equates to 35 hours per week or nearly one full-time employee in savings.

He plans to build on these early accomplishments. “Our team now understands Blue Crystal Solutions is looking at performance measures and at managing our non-conforming results to further improve our performance and company culture.

“With this change in focus, we are now in a position to grow our business with measurement and controls in place that will benefit both our customers and Blue Crystal Solutions.”

Blue Crystal Solutions is in the early planning stages to upgrade to a newer version of ServiceNow with improved resource management features. The business is now rolling out the ServiceNow project management module, and moving the contract management module from pilot to production. In addition, Blue Crystal Solutions plans to replace its resource management tool with the ServiceNow resource management module.

“I think the relationship we have with ServiceNow is quite appropriate and we have never had any issues with the company,” O’Loughlin says. “In fact, their team has been very engaging and very supportive and it’s certainly a relationship I am very comfortable with as we move into the future.

Case Study

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