Zeiss: Focusing on service improvement with Ivanti

ZEISS has 250 staff across Australia and New Zealand. For 10 years, the company relied on FrontRange IT Service Management (ITSM) to control and manage the technology they provide to their customers.

When development and support for the ITSM solution stopped in 2012, it gave ZEISS the perfect opportunity to look for something new. They wanted a dynamic web-based solution with expanded reporting capabilities.

In 2014 FrontRange (renamed as HEAT Software in 2015, and Ivanti in late 2016) recommended that ZEISS talk to Fusion5.

“They did a live demonstration of Ivanti — and we were impressed with how responsive it was,” said Warwick Trevithick, Customer Service and Administration Manager for ZEISS Australasia. After years of exporting data to a third-party solution to generate ticket status reports, Ivanti and its inbuilt Business Intelligence (BI) tools was a breath of fresh air. 

“Straight away we could see the ITSM functions that related to the support tickets we opened. And we got a clear graphic analysis of the status of the tickets, without leaving Ivanti.”

Under the old system, ZEISS ran a complex business model with around 26 different relationships between customers, contracts, addresses and equipment. “Ivanti was more user-friendly than ITSM, and brought the relationships between our different databases down to five,” says Warwick. “That by itself was a compelling reason for us to change solutions.”

Improving ZEISS’s service performance was the primary objective in moving to a new solution. “We needed better reporting capability,” said Warwick, “along with more data transparency. And the ability to manipulate data to produce customised views of customer and equipment history, contract data and so on.”

Now, the company uses Ivanti to focus tightly on customer and supplier management. Administrators use the incident management module to raise, track and report on job tickets.  They can also schedule field service engineers for on-site maintenance or repairs with the task management module. ZEISS use the configuration management module to track the lifecycle of their clients’ equipment.

“Because Ivanti is web-based we can access our data anywhere, including from home. Our staff now have much more flexible working opportunities.”

Warwick Trevithick, Customer Service and Administration Manager, ZEISS Australasia

Warwick says the differences between the old and new solution are considerable. Access to data is no longer restricted to office staff. ZEISS salespeople and engineers can also view the data they need, and do their own reporting or queries. They can manage their own workloads, without the inconvenience of phoning in for the information they need.

ZEISS opted to replicate many of their old manual workflow processes in Ivanti.

"Things in the old system that used to take us a half an hour, for example, only take us five minutes in Ivanti. We’re saving time and money.”

Warwick Trevithick, Customer Service and Administration Manager, ZEISS Australasia

“Our system is quite comprehensive,” says Warwick. “We wanted as much automation as possible, to make us more efficient. For example, replacing our manual quote system. So that inputting data automatically generates quotes for us. Because Ivanti is a web-based solution, we have much more access to advanced technology than with our old ITSM solution, which gives us more possibilities for streamlining our business processes.”

Ivanti can automatically email quotes to customers, and once the quote is accepted, convert them into orders.

Ivanti not only helps the business run more smoothly, the system also saves money. While the business is growing 15-20 per cent, year on year, and this is tracked by an equivalent increase in incidents, Warwick hasn’t taken on more staff. “If we were still on the old system staff numbers would have gone up to compensate. And I’m pleased to say they haven’t.”

ZEISS always had positive customer feedback, and that didn’t change with the introduction of the new system. However, if they’d carried on with the old ITSM, Warwick thinks complaints would have risen. “We couldn’t have managed the growth in incidents as efficiently as we can with Ivanti,” he insists. “Now we’ve got such good visibility, when something goes wrong, we can resolve it quickly before it becomes a bigger issue.”

“They provide an extra level of service. The whole process was smooth and their people are a real pleasure to deal with.”

Warwick Trevithick, Customer Service and Administration Manager, ZEISS Australasia

Warwick found an accommodating business partner in Fusion5. The new system has almost unlimited potential and a programme of ongoing development is now in place. ZEISS joined Fusion5’s PartnerPlus Programme, which gives them extra development days every month, in addition to their ongoing maintenance. The company has been making full use of this option.

“We have a long list of work to do,” says Warwick. “But every time, without fail, we see our processes improve. This gives value to the business, and our staff appreciate it.” The company went over budget on the project, but prefer to see this as a conscious investment they made, once they saw the potential on offer. “Ivanti exposed us to technologies we hadn’t been aware of, so we took the opportunity to improve our process even further. It generated very real business benefits for us, and we couldn’t have continued our growth path without Fusion5 and Ivanti.”