The Challenge

Managing the infrastructural road network of any area is no small task, let alone one of the most travelled areas in Europe. Milano Serravalle manages the surrounding Lombardy region road network and employs around 700 people to monitor the roadways that serve hundreds of thousands of people every day.

Whenever problems occur, Milano Serravalle is there to respond and intervene to fix them alone its extensive road network, which can range from issues with computing systems at toll booths to failures of telephone systems or printers or networking.

Stefano Zangarini, IT System Manager at Milano Serravalle, said, “The Milano Serravalle motorway and bypass is one of the most travelled and congested road networks in northern Italy. Our IT staff carries out maintenance and technical assistance services for systems all along the network. If something goes wrong, we need to be ready to take action in the shortest time possible and in compliance with established service level agreements [SLAs].”

To handle technical support requests, Milano Serravalle previously used internally developed software, which was unable to support reporting against these SLAs and couldn’t manage the incoming assistance or emergency calls properly. Marco Pedrotti, CIO at Milano Serravalle, said, “We wanted to deploy a more advanced and professional ticketing system based on ITIL [Information Technology Infrastructure Library] so that we could improve the speed and quality of service we offer to our users.”

The Solution

After evaluating several applications from leading IT vendors, Milano Serravalle decided to implement OpenText Service Desk.

The company was already using OpenText ZENworks, so the transition to implement Service Desk was even easier. Another product in the ZENworks Suite of products increases the ease of use, standardization and ultimately leads to better results.

Service Desk is highly scalable and easy to deploy, and the solution’s seamless integration with Milano Serravalle’s existing applications helps the company to gain centralized management of all IT resources.

Testing for the product’s potential and to become more familiar with its functionalities took place right away after a rapid implementation that included on the job training for the company’s IT staff.

Pedrotti said, “We were able to take advantage of the product’s integration with our existing infrastructure, thanks to the easy customization of the tool, as well as the native interface with ZENworks. We were so positively impressed that we decided to extend the suite to benefit from a more centralized way of managing our environment. It was easy to connect Service Desk to our Lotus Domino email system, and to set up a mail gateway between the old ticketing system and the new one.”

Stefano Zangarini said, “What happens now when we receive a request for technical assistance is exactly what we wanted. Service Desk automatically escalates calls and directs them to the appropriate person, removing nearly all need for manual intervention.” With Service Desk, Milano Serravalle monitors its performance and its users’ IT requirements from an all-­round perspective. Pedrotti said, “Service Desk has enabled us to improve our service to the users, to keep a close eye on all aspects of service delivery, and to ensure adherence to our SLAs.”

The Results

Service Desk has allowed Milano Serravalle to create a centralized, up­-to-­date and comprehensive view of all its support and maintenance operations, eliminating manual tasks which previously made it difficult to provide a fast and reliable service to users. The solution has also enabled Milano Serravalle to create a hierarchy of priori ties to fully comply with its strict SLAs.

Pedrotti said, “We noticed that a large proportion of support requests are not about real ‘incidents’, but are requests for technical help, which often turn into bespoke mini-­training sessions. We are very confident in the analytic potential of the product to provide feedback to the training department, in order to organize targeted courses for groups of users.”

Zangarini said, “With Service Desk, every single request for assistance is now monitored, registered and directed to the department of reference, which helps us to provide faster, more reliable and targeted support. With Service Desk and ZENworks, we can do almost everything from a central point of control, which has translated into a huge time savings of about 80 percent. Service Desk has proven to be the ideal solution for us.”

A Bit on Service Desk

OpenText ZENworks Service Desk Standard Edition provides sophisticated incident and service request management capabilities, an embedded configuration management database, an integrated knowledge base, and SLA management and reporting for small to medium enterprises. Together, these capabilities give you the ability to streamline your internal IT support operations, lower support costs, and deliver best­ practice service across your organization.

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