Healthcare organization drives down costs with Marval

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Fast Facts

• Service desk calls reduced by 30%
• Significant cost savings
• 30% of customers regularly use the self-service portal
• Improved service delivery
• Increased business productivity

“Since implementing Marval’s IT service management solution, the number of phone calls into our Service Desk has reduced by 30%, a definite cost benefit,” Giles Madin, Informatics Support Team Manager, Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital.

Business Drivers

Formed in 2003, the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital (SATH) National Health Service (NHS) Trust, is the main provider of acute hospital care for almost 500,000 people from Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin, and Mid Wales in the UK. The hospital employs around 5,000 people. The department also provides support for a number of external, smaller hospitals, Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and other specialist areas such as orthopaedic hospitals.

Giles Madin, Informatics Support Team Manager at SATH explains: “We were looking to roll out an ITSM solution to help achieve our service improvement goals of delivering professional, economic, effective, and efficient customer-centric IT support services for our customers. As an NHS Trust, we crucially needed a system that offered value for money and be confident that it would meet our specific needs – both now and in the future.”

The core activities of the SATH Informatics Department, consisting of over 40 personnel, include IT and infrastructure support, IT development, data analysis and reporting, as well as IT training. The team is also responsible for looking after hardware, from configuring and rolling out new PCs, repairing PCs and supporting software applications.

What we delivered

The SATH team considered a number of solutions very carefully over a 12-month period prior to selecting Marval’s integrated, 100% web-based, ITIL® process compliant and ISO/IEC 20000 compatible ITSM solution.

Like most organisations adopting Marval’s ITSM, SATH has taken the expansive, out-of-the-box functionality as a starting point and complemented it with additional functionalities, including linking their own asset discovery tool with Marval’s Asset Discovery Integrator; as well as event management using software that monitors all their systems, picking up critical events and automatically raising those events as requests within the portal.  

SATH is primarily using the self-service portal for incident management, service requests and tasks, but is also making strong inroads in using the product for configuration management. Knowledge management is also an area they are developing, by adding at least one knowledge item into the system per week.

In addition, SATH Informatics are also introducing change management in a formalised and structured way. The department has recently set up an Information Change Advisory Board (ICAB) which meets every fortnight to review planned IT changes or potential changes, which will then be mapped against the change process within the ITSM.

Why Marval

“The key factors in the decision to adopt Marval’s ITSM solution were a system that we could understand, was scalable and that would help us deliver significant benefits and efficiencies to the IT team and the wider organisation,” Giles continues. “The fact that Marval is very ITIL centric ticked another box, as we felt it was important to have a framework that would help us work towards a more standardised and ‘best practice’ approach to our IT business activities and operations.”

Business Outcomes

Giles reveals: “In just 6 months, 30% of our customers now regularly use our web self-service portal, particularly for reporting incidents. We have plans for channel ordering of products, such as PCs and software through self-service. Self-service streamlines the process; it has reduced the number of phone calls into our Service Desk by 30%, a definite cost benefit.

Staff using self-service have found the new ITSM solution easy and intuitive to use.

One area of functionality SATH has used extensively is Marval’s management reporting and dashboard tool, and in particular the ‘real-time’ information. One of the challenges was load-balancing work between two sites. Marval’s graphic representation instantly helped the team see the number of requests that were going from one site to the other. This enabled them to spread the load of service requests easily and evenly between support personnel, providing a better service to both sites.

Other departments within SATH have discovered that the Marval ITSM can be used effectively beyond IT Service Management, and they can see the benefits to them as well. The tool is being partitioned for their Telecoms department to start using in their own right

Future Plans

“Marval’s service management solution is an extremely versatile and comprehensive product; there is a huge amount you can do with it to deliver quality services, concludes Giles. “We chose to use a phased approach, adopting selected processes at a time, which once established, we will look to build on with additional processes. We expect more of our customers to use self-service over time and aim to increase the user base from 30% to 50% within 12 months.”