AESSEAL, who have been a long-standing Hornbill customer, chose to upgrade from their on-premise Supportworks deployment. The team decided to look at the market and choose a modern, cloud solution that would support their aspirations to unify support teams globally. I’m delighted that they selected Hornbill Service Manager.
Having already improved digital interaction and operational efficiency, they’re now looking at expanding the value they’ve created in IT to HR, Marketing, Facilities, and other teams.
I asked Gareth Winder, IT Support Manager, if he would be kind enough to give us some insight around what they have been doing and how the solution has helped them achieve their goals.
- Can you give me a brief background of who you are and what your role is at AESSEAL plc?
I’m Gareth Winder, IT Support Manager at AESSEAL. I’ve worked in various IT roles within the company for 18 years, and in my current role for the last 10 years.
- Which Service Desk tool was in place at AESSEAL before you deployed Hornbill for IT?
Prior to deploying Hornbill, our UK team had been using Supportworks for several years. Although it was a brilliant tool, we struggled to get our teams outside the UK to use it.
- What were the business drivers and reasons for implementing a new solution?
The UK team was happy with Supportworks, but we struggled to get our staff in the US, India, and South Africa to adopt it. We recognised that if we wanted our global teams to use a single platform, we would have to offer a modern service experience, which was easy for our analysts and customers to use and would encourage all teams to jump on-board.
- What was your first impression of Hornbill Service Manager?
My first impression was that the layout of Hornbill immediately reminded me of social media. If you’ve used Facebook or Twitter, it's just as intuitive, and when you’re deploying something new, that's half the battle. We had to facilitate a change in attitudes and explain that we needed global visibility of workload. When we demoed Hornbill to other teams, their attitudes quickly changed. Now we've gone from them logging a handful of jobs per month to really getting to grips with it, and the number of interactions they're having with it is just going up and up.
- What other solutions did you consider/shortlist before choosing Hornbill Service Manager?
I did some research on the internet to see what tools were out there. As the incumbent supplier, we already had a demo of Hornbill, and I just didn't see anything that worked as well or looked as good. We were very happy with Hornbill as a supplier, and the support we received had always been great. So, it just made sense to have a natural progression and go with their next generation product.
- What was your impression of Hornbill during the selection process?
The Hornbill team was very helpful. They understood our environment, the challenges we had with the old tool, and the outcomes we were looking for. The demo addressed all our needs, and gave us huge headroom, both in terms of automation, and the ability to deploy the solution to other teams. The strength of our relationship with Hornbill made selection an easy decision.
- What would you consider your biggest personal success coming out of the project?
The teams in the US, India and South Africa were hesitant to engage with Supportworks but have been keen to adopt Hornbill. And it’s not just the analysts, the number of customers logging things themselves and using self-service is great.
We’re spending less time logging requests, and more time resolving them. Customers can track their own requests without having to call the service desk. The portal makes it easy for customers to distinguish between incidents and requests, and if they make a mistake, we’ve configured a workflow that closes the incident and raises a service request.
Our joiners, leavers, and movers’ processes are changing radically as well. Instead of emails and paper-based forms, we now have people following a workflow. Requests cannot be submitted until all the supporting information has been completed. The workflow automatically notifies line managers when authorisations are required for access to systems or new equipment. Previously, we spent a huge amount of time going back to requestors to get additional information, and now there’s no need. We get the right information first time, the workflow deals with the necessary approvals, and we can act on it quickly.
- Since you went live with Hornbill Service Manager, how has it gone?
It’s still early days since go-live, but the huge uplift in self-service adoption has been a win-win for service delivery teams and for our customers. We’ve currently got incident, problem and service request management set up. Our old solution couldn’t satisfy our ISO requirements for Change Management, so we set it up in SharePoint. However, with Hornbill Service Manager, that’s now back on our radar.
- Can you highlight three things that you love about Hornbill?
It’s incredibly easy to use the tool. From the second they log in, both analysts and customers are instantly familiar with the user interface. And once they’ve logged a request, they’re away, with little need for training. It's well thought out, well laid out, and once you raise a request, the workflow takes over from there.
The workflow is a game changer, and you don’t need technical skills to configure it. The intelligent capture forms gather all the information we need to process a request, and once the customer provides the information, the workflow takes over, getting the authorisations and permissions we need to start working on the request immediately. There’s no need to go back for additional information, so we can deliver faster, and our customers can see how things are progressing on self-service.
The support Hornbill provides has always been great. Now we have additional resources with the new documentation and the Hornbill Academy which are fantastic for education and on-going learning. They allow bite-sized learning, so we can dip in and out whenever we need.
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- If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing you would change about Hornbill right now?
It’s only a minor point, but when you’re configuring workflows, you need to log a ticket to test that it works. If you don’t want these test tickets included in your stats, you need to use the clean-up tool to delete it.
- Is there anything else you would like to mention in relation to Hornbill?
Since launching Self-Service, we’ve had requests from several other departments who want in on the action. Our HR, Marketing, Commercial, Facilities, and other teams can see how much value they could get from the solution. All improvement initiatives are routed through our Business Assurance team, as they need to ensure ISO compliance, and I have no doubt that Hornbill will be able to facilitate that.
Once we’ve been given approval by Business Assurance, we’re going to be very busy gathering requirements and rolling Hornbill out across the business. We’ll get them started, but as you don’t need technical skills to configure workflows, the aim is to transfer skills, so other teams are in control of their own destinies. Where we can add greater value is in delivering end-to-end processes and automating the components that shouldn’t be done manually. It’ll make a huge difference to service delivery teams and employees across the business.
What they achieved:
- Huge uplift in self-service. Less time logging requests, more time resolving them.
- Reduction in service desk calls as customers can track their requests through the portal.
- New joiners/movers/leavers processes – replacing emails and paper forms.
- Expansion of IT processes from incident, problem, and request into change management.
