Kopeyka, a leading Russian retailer, implemented assyst to manage services provided by different divisions of the company. All IT and non-IT assets are now fed into a federated CMDB. Kopeyka has developed an advanced approach to ITSM whereby processes have been created to manage business critical services outside IT. The ability to do this was requested by multiple divisions in the company including Marketing, Sales, Facilities, Quality Control and Finance. For each of these divisions, ITIL processes have been adopted and adapted to the particular requirements of the business and synchronised with the functionality of assyst.
At each stage of the project, a separate process has been implemented to tackle a specific business requirement. The respective business customer was actively involved in the implementation, from scoping and development of the technical aspects to final testing and go-live.
The following business service processes have been implemented with the assyst solution by Axios Systems: management of customer requests and facilities (for the supermarkets, management of costs, etc), as well as IT processes, including Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management. In addition, several business processes have also been incorporated, in particular, IT support for the opening of new supermarkets.
A comprehensive reporting system was developed to support management decisions such as budgeting and investments.
Prior to assyst, another platform was used by Kopeyka for Incident Management and some elements of Problem Management. In 2007, an attempt was made to automate business services with the same platform but it quickly became clear that the functionality was not sufficient to fit the requirements set by the business. Moreover, maintaining and developing the existing solution was seen as more expensive than implementing a new system with more flexible functionality. After extensive research, assyst by Axios Systems was chosen as the most flexible and configurable platform with the lowest total cost of ownership.
As a result of the first implementation phase, which only took 3 weeks, the Sales Department gained a flexible tool with which they could control customer feedback. assyst also now enables the Quality Control Department to directly register all complaints regarding the goods purchased in the supermarkets and quality of service in the shops. The system manages feedback to the customer and the necessary steps taken to correct the situation. This has helped the company to increase customer loyalty.
During the second implementation phase, the Facilities Department developed a system to manage requests from the shops. The cost of each maintenance and support activity is now logged in the system. As a result, Facilities have a comprehensive overview of problems for each type of equipment. The system also allows them to monitor the performance of all parties involved in carrying out maintenance - internal as well as outsourcers. This information is used by the Finance Department for budgeting and as the basis for making decisions about purchasing new equipment.
A single federated CMDB is currently being implemented to obtain a consolidated view of all non-IT assets located in more then 500 supermarkets in over 200 towns and cities throughout Russia. In addition, integrating assyst with a Business Intelligence solution that has been used at Kopeyka for some time has enabled them to create a comprehensive reporting system which is used to monitor KPIs for the Service Desk on a weekly basis.
Several business processes have now been standardised with assyst, including IT support for the opening of new shops. Multi-level workflows have been developed which automatically request approvals from the relevant teams with associated timescales and budgets. The workflow also gives control over project timings in accordance with the corresponding SLAs.
The next project phase in 2010 will include the ability for Marketing to manage internal business processes on the basis of feedback from the shops. This will be implemented in assyst through Change Management functionality: the supermarkets will be able to send requests, such as modifications to the product range or improvements of the purchase processes.
Alexander Artiukhov, CIO at Kopeyka, explained his choice of the ITSM platform assyst by Axios Systems: "By choosing assyst, we did not have to employ a costly team of developers, who would be dedicated to solely maintaining the Service Desk tool, and we did not have to involve external integrators. These were important drivers for us to look for an out-of-the-box solution. We are a large grocery retailer in the discount sector, which means costs are important to us - not only implementation costs, but the overall cost of ownership. Another important factor in favour of assyst was that the solution is fully ITIL-aligned and is built around a federated CMDB.
Maturity of the product was another key point - assyst has benefited from more than 20 years of development and investment. In addition, assyst has already been successfully implemented into other retail organisations in Russia. We realized that the platform had to support a fully-functioning web interface, with the possibility of integration with the Business Intelligence system which has been in use at our company for quite some time. The flexibility and integration capabilities of assyst allowed us to do that seamlessly. We have been working with the assyst solution by Axios Systems for almost a year now, and based on our experience - it is a very easy system for us to work with."
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