The concept of “IT Service Management” or ITSM may be a designation headed for extinction. A clear trend taking place across a wide range of enterprises is that these workflow processes, once restricted to IT departments, are now crossing business unit boundaries into additional functional areas. Forward-looking organizations are starting to leverage their ITSM platforms to apply workflow automation best practices to key business units such as human resources and finance departments. And they’re doing so for good reasons.
According to industry pundits, the expansion of “service management” across enterprise business units is a $5 billion market opportunity. But, while ITSM companies, like ServiceNow, are now suddenly touting the applicability of service management beyond the realm of IT, FrontRange has been quietly pursuing this strategy for the past few years and they’ve got customers to prove it. Total Wine and More, the largest independent retailer of fine wines with over 100 stores in 15 states, implemented FrontRange’s Heat Service Management across IT, accounting and HR, and as a result improved its error margin for the routing of service requests by 90%.
Total Wine’s top priority was to improve the service desk platform that supported IT, accounting and human resource processes for 2,000 employees. Total Wine set its sights on an IT service management (ITSM) solution that would improve support efficiency and effectiveness as well as would provide useful metrics. Having a self-service functionality was part of the blend of requirements, so stores could be notified immediately of any IT outages, including the business-critical point-of-sale system.
Total Wine’s retail, IT, and accounting teams now use HEAT Service Management daily, and user reaction has been universally positive. With HEAT’s self-service portal, employees can submit new requests, report incidents and track the progress of their tickets with ease.
In the first quarter of using self-service, the service desk staff fielded 300 fewer calls. HEAT Service Management’s drag-and-drop workflow designer makes it easy to create and modify service workflows. Under the old system, all accounting tickets had to be routed and handled the same way, which resulted in delays in service. “We worked with the accounting department to create templates that would be routed to three different groups,” says Candice Peacock, IT Service Desk Manager, Total Wine and More. “With the HEATtemplates, we cut down on misassigned tickets by 90 percent.”
Automating workflow with HEAT Service Management in the cloud has made it easier to set up new employees, which is essential for a fast-growing retail business. In the past, managers used a paper form to request a laptop or desktop for a new hire, but the form didn’t ask whether the employee needed two monitors. “The manager would inevitably call to tell us that the new hire didn’t get what they needed,” says Peacock. “With HEAT Service Management, all of the questions for a new hire are part of the template.”
The addition of HEAT Service Management’s workflow has helped Total Wine refine its business processes for IT, human resources and accounting. The service desk is now seen not only as experts in resolving IT issues, but also experts in the technology needs of the business.
