In support of improving its business processes throughout the organisation, the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), has extended its use of Heat, the service management application from FrontRange Solutions, from its IT department to human resources and facilities management.
The DBSA had run its IT helpdesk with Heat for a number of years before deciding at the end of last year to realign its support services more closely with the dynamic needs of its 700 internal IT users.
"We wanted to redesign the problem resolution and service delivery processes in the entire IT department so as to provide a more relevant service to our users," says James Thackrah, DBSA's IT architect.
"We also wanted to extend our service delivery capabilities beyond the six people manning the helpdesk and, thereby, boost our compliance with service level agreements (SLAs).
"We called in FrontRange Solutions (South Africa) to help us define the components of the processes that would best meet our needs. We then built function specifications that would be customised in our Heat system.
"That exercise was so successful that 91% of all incoming calls we handle daily are now meeting SLAs - a significant improvement on where we were.
"At the same time, we trained all 40 members of our IT staff on Heat, ensuring that we can bring more skilled resources to bear in a more streamlined way in solving user problems.
"An important additional benefit is that we can use Heat measurements related to meeting our SLAs in IT employees' annual performance reviews - giving us an objective and highly-focused means of developing our staff."
Based on the success of the IT department's process revision exercise, the DBSA also recently invited FrontRange Solutions specialists to customise Heat for defining and refining business processes for the human resources and facilities management departments.
"That's the beauty of Heat," Thackrah says. "It can be applied in very broad contexts and it copes easily with new technologies, as we discovered when we extended it to include SMS technology.
"We've worked with Heat in one form or another for many years and see no reason to change. It keeps adjusting itself to us rather than us having to trim what we do to fit the technology.
"Also, our relationship with FrontRange Solutions has always been positive. It represents a very comfortable way to stay ahead of the technology curve."
FrontRange Solutions product manager for Africa, Paul Bornhutter, agrees. "Strong long-term relationships between the customer and the vendor mean that the customer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of discovering and then exploiting the full value of the solution. The vendor helps him find the short cuts all the time.
"In the process, the vendor gains not only a loyal customer but also extensive repeat business, as new technologies to which the customer must adapt come along. The customer trusts you not to foist an upgrade on him for the sake of you making a bit of extra revenue. You also don't have to do any foisting because you know your customer will continue to buy from you as long as you keep providing value.
"That's the kind of customer relationship management neither party needs software to understand."
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