The Land and Agricultural Development Bank of South Africa (Land Bank), tasked with transforming the agricultural sector through the provision of finance and other services to existing and previously marginalised farmers, uses HEAT, the service management application from FrontRange Solutions, to ensure optimum functioning of its information technology (IT).
"As an organisation that has itself had to be transformed and whose mandate has expanded since 1997 to include working with partners and through alliances to ensure success for emerging farmers by the provision not only of financial resources but also land and skills, we're always updating our business and workflow processes," says Land Bank IT operations manager, Johannes Sengwane.
"That means that our IT processes have to be enormously flexible - as do our help-desk services and the means by which we track the success and relevance of our IT support services.
"HEAT enables that because it's so easy to use that we can customise and enhance it easily in-house.
"Also, we provide remote support to 800 internal IT users based in branches all over the country. HEAT enables us to track and more proactively manage our service level agreements in all cases, as well as generate the kind of detailed trend reports that give us insight into how best to adjust our service to more accurately meet the needs of users."
In addition, Sengwane's department uses HEAT as a customer feedback tool and, therefore, as a means of improving customer satisfaction. "We very quickly take corrective action on user ratings of our various service offerings as well as user comments on the level of service we provide. So users can see in extremely practical terms that we take them seriously and that they have a direct influence on the way they are served and therefore on their own levels of productivity.
"As a result, they're much happier with us than they were before HEAT was implemented.
"HEAT's an essential tool for us. We're not about to move away from it."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) product manager for Africa, Paul Bornhutter, says HEAT is a particularly effective technology for organisations undergoing transformation of whatever sort.
"Because HEAT is designed around process rather than features and functionality - and actually anticipated service-oriented architecture (SOA) in terms of permitting the easy replication of processes and functionality - it's adaptable to all business circumstances. It demands no extra attention from the IT department or systems administrator when the business changes the way it chooses to work.
"And in a case like Land Bank having to extend its services beyond its traditional customer base to previously disadvantaged farmers, not in a scaled-down form but by way of far-reaching innovation, HEAT lends itself to the integration of the new into the old."
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