Infrastructure Support

Case Study
Page 1 of 4
Business-As-Usual support
25
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Pan-European Smarter Support solution for
global financial services group
At a glance
Executive summary
Across Europe’s major financial centres, Excel provides datacentre to desktop
business-as-usual (BAU) support services to one of the world’s leading financial services
providers.
Working from London and Frankfurt, our engineers, systems and toolsets provide
business critical support for three datacentres and deliver frontline support to thousands
of employees across eight major and 15 regional office locations.
The service has grown and evolved throughout Excel’s 25 year history.
Flexible team providing optimised
BAU support across the full physical
infrastructure, including desktop,
datacentre, telephony, moves and
asset management
Leveraging specialist toolsets
including proprietary MIS tools and
innovative mobile solutions
As well as helping the client achieve the required performance levels from its
infrastructure investments, our Smarter Support BAU philosophy has driven innovation
to introduce new efficiencies, improved service quality and add new service functionality.
Supporting 14,000 end-users in eight
major and 15 regional office locations
across EMEA region;
As a result of our efficient, effective and innovative BAU provision, we have also been
invited to implement a range of critical infrastructure projects, including the three-year
rollout of a new enterprise-wide telephony system.
Supporting three datacentres in
EMEA region; up to 24x7x365
Comprehensive desktop moves
planning and implementation; 9,200
in 2013
Three-year EMEA-wide telephony
rollout
Excel I.T. Ltd
Trafalgar House,
712 London Road,
Grays, Essex
RM20 3JT
Tel: 01708 865 855 . [email protected] . www.excelit.com .
@excel_it
Case Study
Page 2 of 4
Business-As-Usual support
25
S
AR
YE
Pan-European Smarter Support solution for
global financial services group
The client
Excel delivers BAU infrastructure support to
a global financial services group which
provides investment banking, asset management and wealth management services for
private, corporate, and institutional clients
worldwide.
Our engineers, systems and toolsets provide
comprehensive front line support for 14,000
employees across eight offices in major
European financial capitals, 15 regional
offices and three datacentres across two
cities.
Throughout the relationship, the challenge
for the Excel team has been to continually
adapt to the evolving needs of the bank,
innovating to reduce costs or supporting new
technologies as they come on stream.
Our commitment to innovation and continuous improvement has seen this client
relationship evolve and expand throughout
Excel’s entire 25 year history.
The solution | smart engineers
Fundamental to the delivery of our BAU
services has always been our focus on
finding and retaining the highest calibre of
people – IT infrastructure professionals who
combine the highest level of skill and
experience with a commitment to the values
and attitudes which have come to define the
‘Excel experience’.
The successful delivery of continuous
improvement, risk control and quality
assurance through our integrated service
delivery model depends on every ‘link’ in the
Excel chain operating to the same high
standard. This principle underpins our
development programme, with more than 40
hours of training and development every
year for every member of our engineering
and project teams.
In addition, each possesses an array of
qualities to ensure they can fulfil the full
range of support requirements: all are fully
qualified, exhibit great team player
qualities and importantly, given they are
often the only network engineers at a
particular site, are great communicators.
The result is a flexible, knowledgeable and
skilled resource pool that is ideally suited
to meet the high demands of our clients.
The solution | smart toolsets
Excel’s Smarter Support approach revolves
around the deployment of these
market-leading engineering resources
alongside advanced infrastructure-specific
toolsets – whether aligning ourselves to the
client’s existing systems, introducing
leading-edge infrastructure technology or
deploying our own propriety tools for
datacentre and desktop management, such
as our infrastructure and network specific
MIS tool XactTM.
The toolsets work together to increase
engineer productivity but also to provide
real time information that helps customers
manage its environments in better and
more cost effective ways.
Client systems: our dedicated engineering
team interacts with, and is fully conversant
with, client systems including: Remedy;
ServiceNow; Sharepoint; and ISAC.
XactTM: Excel’s powerful and highly
customisable MIS tool is deployed at
customer sites to support the client teams
and our own engineers across the full range
of installation, support and
improvement initiatives.
By aggregating information from a wide
range of systems into a customisable and
easy-to-use dashboard, Xact™ provides the
Tel: 01708 865 855 . [email protected] . www.excelit.com .
@excel_it
real-time management information needed to
effectively manage this complex IT
infrastructure environments. Key features
include:
• Real-time project delivery status
across all projects, allowing project
managers to manage multiple
programmes simultaneously and give
customers 24 x 7 access to project
delivery status
• In-field engineer reports in real time,
with tickets updated as tasks are
completed
• Customisable and easy-to-use
dashboard
• In-depth statistics around support
service requests and faults – allowing
users to carry out root cause analysis
• Online procurement module to reduce
procurement time and simplify the
approval processes
• Detailed view of Excel’s on-site
resources, allowing easy monitoring
and management of more efficient
resourcing levels.
Innovation: To tackle the specific challenges
arising from multi-building campuses, mobile
tools linked to ITSM platforms, including
Remedy, have been developed. These allow
engineers to regularly check for faults and
service requests while away from their desks,
cutting SLA times to complete incidents.
Excel I.T. Ltd
Trafalgar House,
712 London Road,
Grays, Essex
RM20 3JT
Case Study
Page 3 of 4
Business-As-Usual support
25
Pan-European Smarter Support solution for
global financial services group
BAU Implementation
Support hours to individual datacentres are tailored
to specific requirements, up to 24x7x365 for key
facilities.
Flexible BAU teams based on London and Frankfurt
deliver optimised and efficient support across the
Desktop moves
client’s EMEA infrastructure.
In addition to smaller, less complex ‘BAU
moves’, Excel plans , audits, implements, tests
Support engineers are specialists across all relevant
and supports thousands of user moves in a
disciplines relating to structured cabling, network
typical year – 9,200 in 2013.
topology, IP telephony, BAU management, asset
management and moves, adds and changes (MAC).
Moves can vary between a single person move to
whole department relocations, can take place in
Their cross-training ensures they can deliver all
front-office (trading) or back-office (support)
required activities around the physical
environments – with a trader’s desk, for example,
infrastructure/connectivity layer within the
including up to five PCs, eight screens and dealer
business.
voice telephony.
The desktop environment
Across eight major European offices and 15 regional
offices, our engineers support nearly 14,000 end users.
The majority of moves take place at weekends,
although smaller moves can take place during the
week out of business hours. Our bespoke moves
management toolset efficiently manages the entire
Support in London is provided from 06:30 to 22:00, process, allowing the bank to make changes to the
requirements right up to the Friday afternoon
and in Frankfurt from 06:30 to 19:00.
before the move.
In 2013 we responded to more than 1,000 incidents
and 10,000 patching (IMAC) requests.
IP Telephony
As the provider of first and second line support for
Activities include the install, break/fix, connectivthe company’s telephony systems, Excel was
ity and testing of technologies including: network
best-placed to support the client through a
infrastructure; VOIP; Meridian telephony; market
three-year migration to an advanced new
data services; dealerboard, Speakerbus & headsets;
enterprise-wide telephony solution with the
AV / multimedia; faxes & printers; ADSL and BRI
feature-sets required to support this sophisticated
provisioning.
financial services operation.
The datacentre
Trained and supported to work equally well
alongside client engineers or as the only on-site
infrastructure network, our engineers hold
responsibilities including: patching; install and
break/fix; racking and stacking; server, switch and
router installation; and third-party chaperoning.
Excel’s BAU support is fully integrated with the
client’s Remedy system.
Working closely with the system provider, our
engineers supported the design, build and test,
and go-live stages for each EMEA site.
Design included co-ordinating site discovery
activity, carrying out network assessment tests and
providing real-time reporting on T-12 status. By
putting project plans into our XactTM MIS toolkit,
the status of any site could be reviewed in real time
through an online portal.
Tel: 01708 865 855 . [email protected] . www.excelit.com .
@excel_it
Within the build and test phase we were responsible for DiD porting and testing, patching of POE
switches, installing and testing new phones and
equipment, and the real time updating of the
client’s Webex tool.
Finally the go-live phase was implemented at each
site, including the recovery of old phones and
switches, the disposal of non-reusable equipment
and data cleansing of hardware as required.
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Case Study
Page 4 of 4
Business-As-Usual support
25
Pan-European Smarter Support solution for
global financial services group
Results: The Excel Advantage
By implementing the Smarter Support
principles of smart engineering resources
working with smart toolsets, Excel’s BAU
service has delivered consistently high results
across service quality, response times, cost
control and service innovation, with
highlights including:
• Desktop response: Excel has
consistently been able to reduce call
and request response times for this
client, with the average number of calls
in queue falling by an average of 18
percent every year over the last three
years.
• Workload management: our BAU
team has been able to achieve this
reduction in response times despite
needing to accommodate an ever
increasing workload without adding
additional resources; a combination of
training, management processes and
new toolsets including mobile
engineering resources has been key to
this.
As a result of all these outcomes, this BAU
relationship has grown from a modest local
support contract (Excel’s first) to become an
end-to-end Pan European BAU support
service which fully embodies Excel’s Smarter
Support philosophy – smart engineers
supported by smart toolsets to support,
optimise and evolve the physical IT
infrastructure.
Excel is proud to have become a partner of
choice not just for BAU support, but also
for structured cabling installations, MAC
services, RTB support and numerous other
IT services across London, Frankfurt and
their wider EMEA campus.
• IP telephony: our understanding of
the client business and our experience
of the EMEA sites and systems,
combined with our technical and
project management expertise, enabled
the smooth implementation of a
sophisticated enterprise-wide IP
telephony system
Excel I.T. Ltd
Trafalgar House,
712 London Road,
Grays, Essex
RM20 3JT
Tel: 01708 865 855 . [email protected] . www.excelit.com .
@excel_it
S
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YE