Patrick Bolger

Crown Packaging - Modernizing Enterprise IT Crown Packaging is the leader in metal packaging technology and the number one producer of food cans and metal vacuum closures in the world. In 2017, the company celebrated its 125th anniversary and now operates in 36 countries, employing over 24,000 people and has net sales of $8.3 billion. At Crown, a focus on innovation is not reserved for individuals with “innovation” or “product development" in their titles. By making innovation everyone’s job, Crown fosters a spirit of continuous improvement every day. IT Service Management Challenges Crown Europe’s IT Group had implemented multiple ITSM tools in the last 15 years, but none of these solutions met their requirements. In 2010, Crown partnered with ITC InfoTech, a specialized global full-service technology solutions provider, who were using HP Service Manager. To simplify integration with its outsourcing partner, Crown made the decision to also use HP Service Manager. The implementation focussed on deploying Crown’s ITSM processes, but this process-centric approach gave rise to several issues, and delivered a solution that was not easy to navigate or use, making it difficult for Crown IT staff to handle requests efficiently. Getting metrics from HP Service Manager was quite tough, so Crown initially relied upon the canned reports provided within the tool. To generate specific KPI’s, Crown used Business Objects to connect and extract data from the HP Service Manager database. This approach was cumbersome and the lack of useful KPI’s was a significant challenge. In March 2016, Crown and ITC InfoTech determined that the challenges of usability and metrics in HP Service Manager needed to be addressed, and in April 2016, Crown began to investigate the ITSM tools market. The partners agreed to a deadline of two months to evaluate a number of ITSM tools, and make a decision to select a new tool by the end of May 2016. The new tool needed to be intuitive, simple to configure, and at the same time, powerful. Having been burned by the complexity of reporting in HP Service Manager, Crown wanted to carefully explore the metrics capabilities of each tool to ensure that the new solution would be able to meet their KPI needs, and enable ITC InfoTech to demonstrate conformance with contractual SLA’s. ITC InfoTech provides support for Crown’s infrastructure services, covering network, desktop, laptop, server, software deployment, management of user accounts, as well as support for over 50 different software applications. All incidents and service requests are logged directly by Crown users with ITC InfoTech’s multi-lingual service desk. The service desk needed a platform that was contemporary and intuitive. The solution needed to provide a digital experience to all users and analysts, while enabling the required metrics to be generated and presented in a simplified manner. Last chance to get ITSM right Having implemented multiple enterprise ITSM tools over the last 15 years, Terry Dobb, Crown’s VP CIO made it clear that the team should choose very carefully, and select a solution that was both contemporary and would work for years into the future. During April 2016, Frederic Beugin, Director of Operations and Supports, and the Crown Europe team looked at several ITSM tools, including the latest version of HP Service Manager, HP Service Anywhere, Samanage, ServiceNow and Hornbill Service Manager. The team produced a matrix of all the key features they needed within the tool and asked each vendor to provide an evaluation system, so the team could use the tools and ascertain whether they met their criteria. All vendors were invited to attend site to demonstrate their solutions, and answer any questions from Crown. After the demonstrations, Crown and ITC InfoTech staff ran intensive testing for a period of three weeks, and all solutions were marked and ranked to produce a shortlist. At the end of this process, ServiceNow and Hornbill Service Manager were the final two vendors in the shortlist. Frederic explains that although ServiceNow is a market leader, with a powerful and complete solution, Crown recognized that implementing ServiceNow would have been a major project. The vendor had initially quoted 90 days to get the basic processes up-and-running. However, after further clarification of requirements, Crown realized that this estimate was likely to double. Although the vendor offered significant discounts on software subscriptions, the cost and complexity of implementing ServiceNow was excessive. Cost aside, the team leaders running the evaluation process had leaned towards Hornbill Service Manager, mainly due to the intuitive nature of the tool, ease of configuration, and their interactions with Hornbill staff. Frederic explains, “Although we finally negotiated a great deal on subscription pricing with ServiceNow, it only extended to the first two years, and after that the price would increase year after year. Many enterprise IT organizations will ‘select the market-leader’ because it’s perceived to be the safest option. However, our team was very impressed with the ease of use and intuitiveness of Hornbill Service Manager. Functionality-wise, it ticked all the boxes, and commercially, Hornbill’s service offering is radically different to other enterprise ITSM vendors.” The Hornbill difference Frederic explains, “Hornbill’s ‘priced for life’ policy guarantees that the price we pay when we subscribe will never increase for as long as we remain a customer. We didn’t have to sign up to 3 or 5-year contract, we could subscribe and terminate at any point, and if our product champions get promoted, or leave the company, Hornbill will train their replacements free of charge. This speaks volumes about the company, their commitment to delivering great service, and their attitude to customer retention and loyalty. But in the end, what really stood out was the intuitiveness and power of the tool. During the evaluation, one team leader said “With Hornbill, you can really feel the experience of the designer. All the tools are pragmatic, and it’s easy to make all the changes we need to make life easier for our end users and analysts.” In June 2016, the decision was made to select Hornbill Service Manager. To allow sufficient time for Crown’s procurement and planning processes, implementation was scheduled for August 2016. Big-bang implementation to minimize disruption The scope of the implementation was broad. Crown already used ITIL, but previous efforts to adopt the framework were ‘by-the-book’ and focussed entirely on processes. Implementing Hornbill Service Manager provided a fantastic opportunity to revisit ITIL, but this time, from a Services perspective. Crown decided that a big-bang approach would minimize the period of disruption. During the implementation, Hornbill Product Specialists were supported by an exceptional team, led by Crown’s Technical Support Team Leader, Lyonel Remond. The implementation commenced in mid-August 2016 and a tight two-month deadline was set for go-live in October. It was a huge challenge, as Lyonel explains, “Revisiting our ITIL adoption meant that we had to stop talking about applications, systems and servers, and move towards Services and the design of our Service Catalog. It was a massive challenge for Crown IT, as it would completely change the way we worked. That’s where Hornbill’s 30-day implementation and free switch-on was invaluable. Hornbill’s Product Specialist was very patient and took time to explain how we could structure the Service Catalog. Once that structure was in place, we could design our ITIL processes from a Services perspective, which made sense, and made our processes more effective. We needed to look at all our SLA’s and redesign those, and Hornbill’s Product Specialist helped set these up and do some tweaking to the processes we designed, to improve the flow of work. Working with the Hornbill Team, we managed to get all the technical elements out-of-the-way in a couple of weeks. By the time we went live, we had over 300 items in the Service Catalog, and now, nine months later, it’s over 400. These catalog items are grouped under Service Categories, and our users are only presented with services they are entitled to subscribed to via the Service Portal, and it works brilliantly.” A smooth go-live experience Hornbill Service Manager is intuitive, so service desk analysts don’t need much training. Prior to go-live, Crown’s service desk analysts had only two training sessions. Hornbill delivered a one-hour session on how to use the tool, and after this session analysts were encouraged to log on and familiarize themselves with the solution. Two weeks later, Crown staff delivered an internal training session, which explained how the service management processes worked. Two days later, Hornbill Service Manager went live. Frederic explains, “Go-live was a very smooth experience. All that we had to do was send a couple of notifications, reminding staff how to use certain aspects of the tool. We sent a member of staff to India to support go-live for our partner, and this also went very smoothly.” Saurabh Saket, General Manager IT Services, ITC InfoTech said, “We had excellent communication from Crown before go-live, so on-boarding of our service desk staff took no time at all. One of the main reasons that the tool has been so successful in our environment is the preparation that went into process design and trainings conducted with the team. The Heads-Up Display is a massive hit with the analysts. Analysts can immediately see where they are in the process, what’s coming next, and what should be done with tasks and automation. Progressive Capture is also a big benefit, as it ensures that you get the right information, first time, so analysts can immediately start work on resolution, and this really helps with our SLA performance. Hornbill Service Manager – a big hit with users, analysts and management “Communication within the tool has been well thought out”, said Lyonel. “It’s the simple things, like responding to customer emails from within the tool, and being easily able to assign tasks to colleagues that make a significant difference. Mentions allow us to request help from subject matter experts, by simply using the @ symbol and a colleague’s name. They get an instant notification and can easily jump in to provide help.” Frederic said, “The Service Portal was an instant hit, both with users and analysts. Previously, we had forty support mailboxes receiving users ‘requests or system alerts, and we reduced this to two. Thanks to the metrics in Hornbill Service Manager, we now know that around 40% of our users have already accessed the Service Portal. Thanks to Progressive Capture, end users can create incidents and requests themselves, which are then immediately routed to the correct resolver group. Since go-live, in October 2016, around 9% of all incidents and requests have been created by end users. This may not sound like a huge number, but end users in the manufacturing industry don’t typically use Self-Service at all. But the best news is that 20% of these Self-Service requests have been resolved by users themselves.” “The Service Portal, and particularly the FAQ’s and Service Bulletins are clearly a big hit. Previously, with HP Service Manager, our feedback on resolved incidents was around 6%, but with the simple feedback facility in Hornbill Service Manager, we’ve managed to raise our feedback rates to 17%. With HP Service Manager, users were bombarded with emails, but now, they get the right communication at the right time, and several people have commented on the simplicity and clarity of these updates. In some manufacturing plants, we’re still using older browsers, and once these have been updated to the latest versions, I anticipate even greater adoption of Self-Service.” Sharing improvements with KPI’s and metrics “The KPI’s we’ve created have made a real impression with Senior management, especially our CIO. Our key metrics run as a slideshow in our primary office in Wantage, so everyone can see how we’re performing. These metrics do a fantastic job explaining how much we’ve improved. Our backlog has dropped significantly. Our CIO is very happy with our performance, especially with the feedback he’s received from our customers, our service desk analysts, and our partner, ITC InfoTech.” Hornbill Service Manager enables the digital workplace Saurabh Saket, General Manager IT Services, ITC InfoTech said, “Hornbill is a digital workplace tool, with a rich and intuitive user experience. This is a new age, where people want to use software that is as familiar as the tools they use in their personal and consumer lives, and Hornbill Service Manager provides that kind of experience. It’s a digital workplace platform that stands out from a crowd of cumbersome ITSM tools. It presents the right information, at the right time, which makes it much easier for our people to do their work.” Collaboration creates potential for further improvements Lyonel explains that although Crown is using some of the collaborative features of Hornbill Service Manager, a recent trip to a Hornbill Customer event made him realize that Crown could achieve so much more through collaboration. Lyonel said, “I was at Hornbill event in London recently, and one of my colleagues needed my input for an important job. Previously this would have been buried in a long list of emails, and I would probably have missed it. Fortunately, I had the Hornbill app on my mobile and was instantly able to provide the information they needed, so the work could be completed. After the Hornbill Insights event, I went back to my team and told them that if they wanted to ask me a question, they should use the @mention facility in Hornbill, rather than sending me an email. Now, if I get a question by email, I copy the email into a Workspace and reply using @mention. It takes time to change people’s behaviour, but now it’s beginning to take off, and pay off within my team. We’re currently producing some guidelines on the use of Workspaces, then I’ll be pushing hard to make more effective use of collaboration across every team within the IT organization.” No more upgrade pains According to Lyonel, one of the most impressive things about Hornbill Service Manager is the automatic upgrades. Hornbill’s continual deployment approach means that around 4 or 5 releases are made available each month. Lyonel said, “Most SaaS vendors claim that upgrades are seamless. However, when you dig a bit deeper, typically it means a project, with cloning, upgrading, testing, and often reapplying the changes you previously made to the application. With Hornbill, it’s a simple update, much like you’d update an app on your mobile phone. We’ve deployed numerous updates, with no disruption to service. With Hornbill, all it takes is a single click and thirty seconds later the update is done, all our customizations carry on working, and we never have to deal with upgrade pains again.” Major benefits Frederic says, “From a management perspective, the visibility into the workload of different teams is a major benefit. More importantly, we can share these metrics right across the business, so we’re now working transparently, and our improvements are there for all to see. I’ve had so many positive comments about the metrics slideshows.” “However, for me, the biggest benefit is that Hornbill Service Manager truly considers everyone within the Service Lifecycle; from our end users and customers using the Service Catalog, the simplicity and effectiveness of the analyst interface, through to the richness of metrics available to management…it’s incredibly well thought-out and very well integrated. With HP Service Manager, and with many of the tools we looked at during our selection process, we would have required a team of developers to customize and maintain the solution. With Hornbill Service Manager, setting up our business processes and workflow is a simple point and click operation. It’s incredibly easy to administer, requires no technical skills, and there’s little or no maintenance overhead. Compared to where we were with our previous solution…it’s night and day.” Sharing his final thoughts on selecting Hornbill Service Manager, Frederic says, “At the start of our selection process, our CIO made it clear that this was our last chance to select the right tool. It would have been easy to choose the market leader, but Hornbill’s approach, and the tool itself, was clearly a more innovative solution. I’m happy to say that since Hornbill Service Manager was implemented, not a day has gone by when I have questioned our decision.”

@Lyonel I've attached a slide from my session at the last Hornbill Insights event, which might be useful to you.

A Bird's eye view of Global IT Bird & Bird LLP is an international law firm, with over 1200 lawyers in 28 offices across Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, helping clients based in over 120 countries across the globe. The firm aims to be the number one law firm in the world for organisations being changed by technology or the digital world. This global ambition requires a global IT approach. Therefore, Bird & Bird’s IT department has a specific way of working: as each office supports fee-earning lawyers, IT support must be present locally to ensure they can provide a swift and effective response to requests. Experienced staff are required, as at each location, IT analysts must have significant insight and knowledge of local applications, server settings and communications. Although local IT groups were highly effective at resolving issues, when the same issues impacted services in different countries, there was significant duplication of effort. When Nard Van Breemen joined the firm as Global IT Support Manager, Bird & Bird was using different service management products in each country. It was clear to Nard that Bird & Bird needed an integrated Service Management solution to provide insight into IT workload at each location, so that Central IT could spot trends sooner, respond faster and manage demand more effectively. Therefore, the new tool had to enable the flow of information, communication and collaboration between local offices and Central IT. Selecting the new tool was a team decision Before starting his search, Nard and his teams compiled a list of requirements, using MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have and Won’t have this time) to prioritise the functionality they needed. Nard wanted to draw on the experiences of the teams in each country and get their feedback about their existing tools and impression of the different vendors bidding for the work. Remote demonstrations were arranged with three vendors, attended by IT support leads from every country. Secondary sessions we arranged to provide even greater exposure and address questions that arose from the first round of demonstrations. Nard was aware that adoption of a new tool would be heavily dependent on the preferences of each team, so he decided not to influence the selection process and instead turned the decision over and asked his teams to reach consensus. Nard explains that Hornbill Service Manager “ticked every single box, functionality-wise, but was not over-priced. There wasn’t a dramatic difference between any of the products in terms of licensing/subscription costs, but implementation was a different matter. We didn’t want to pay for months of consulting just to get the basic processes set up. Although price was one of the deciding parameters, the teams decided that Hornbill would be a better fit, both from a product and partner perspective.” Bringing Hornbill Service Manager to life within the organisation At the end of the selection process, you hope that you’ve selected the right tool, but you don’t know for sure until the tool has been implemented. Hornbill’s 30-day switch-on approach proved to be unique and insightful. Nard explains, “Typically, you incur subscription costs up-front, followed by implementation, and only when the tool is up and running, can you be certain that you’ve made the right choice. Hornbill’s 30-day switch-on was different. Their Product Specialists did a fantastic job in understanding our complexity, especially around email and local support needs. As we went through the switch-on process, we gained the first solid insights into the product, how it worked, and more importantly, how it worked in our environment, with our data and processes. At the end of the process, not only did we have a working tool, we also had all the knowledge we needed to get more from the tool, and truly bring it alive within the organisation. Hornbill certainly delivered on its promise to enable us to make an informed decision at the end, and more importantly, delivered everything that they promised.” Visual Management - a holistic view of IT Services By the end of April 2017, the switch-on process was complete, but Nard and his team spent a further three weeks ‘polishing’ Hornbill Service Manager to ensure a successful go-live at their offices in The Hague, Netherlands. Over the last few months, Hornbill Service Manager has been rolled out to teams in other countries and Central IT now has a holistic view of Global IT Services. Nard explains, “Our structure and the need for specialised local IT support, meant that there was significant duplication of effort. Getting a complete picture of the status of Global IT Services was a real challenge. Implementing Hornbill Service Manager has changed that. I particularly like the visual management capabilities within the tool, especially the heads-up display, as it instantly communicates the status of requests, and keeps everyone informed, so progress is much easier. Hornbill Service Manager is an incredibly powerful tool and we’ve only scratched the surface. The collaborative features are particularly exciting, as they will enable information and communication to flow freely between teams in different offices and countries. Collaboration will change the way we work, and take Global IT Services to the next level. The underlying ambition for me is to be in a better position to serve our lawyers who are serving our clients.”

Collaboration is essential for modern ITSM I recently had a chat with Kaimar Karu, Head of Product Strategy and Development at AXELOS, about the importance of collaboration in ITSM. Through his engagement with IT, agile and development communities around the world, Kaimar has a deep appreciation of the need for collaboration between different teams, to ensure that the customer is getting value from service management. In this video we discuss the need for increased visibility and openness, both between IT teams, and with customers. Collaboration underpins all agile methods, and with modern tools supporting visual management approaches e.g. Kanban boards, work no longer needs to remain locked behind the doors of separate IT teams. These tools place work out in the open, visible to different IT groups, and to customers. As teams carry out their activities, boards make it easy to see what work has been done, and what’s still outstanding, so that everyone is kept up to date and the customer has full visibility. Development, Operations and Infrastructure teams have very specialist skills, and they benefit from working in silos. However, when the silo mentality takes over, teams tend to focus on their own goals and targets, rather than the end-to-end flow of work and the value that’s delivered to the customer. That’s where the power of collaboration comes in. It’s not about tearing down silos, it’s about connecting them. Collaboration enables people to do their best work with others, in an open and visible manner, which builds trust between teams. We touch on DevOps, ITIL Practitioner, and the change of mindset that is required if traditional ITSM is to keep up with the pace of business change. Kaimar explains that AXELOS has recently announced an international research initiative to support the ongoing development of ITIL®, which aims to produce practical guidance, based on input and feedback from practitioners. At 12:40 into our discussion, we agree that Service Management is not about how well processes work together…it’s about how well people work together, to deliver value to the customer. And that’s why collaboration is essential for ITSM. Thanks to Kaimar for taking the time to chat with me. Follow Kaimar on Twitter for great insights and discussion about modern ITSM.

Integrated Service Management at Idox Engaged employees can help to drive a company's profits. If an organization has productive and satisfied employees, supported by effective service management processes, it has a higher chance of delivering better service to external customers. This week I had an excellent conversation with Martyn Houghton, Problem and Knowledge Manager at Idox about their integrated service management strategy. A common service management platform Martyn works in the Public Sector Software division, which provides market-leading solutions to 90% of UK local authorities. Idox is a business with many arms, providing software solutions to multiple industry sectors. With such a diverse solution set, it would be impossible to manage customer requests through a single service desk. The Idox strategy was to configure separate service desks to meet the needs of each division, using a common service management platform. Idox had been using a foundational on-premise ITSM tool for Incident and problem management. Although it worked well, they had hit the limits of the tool and could not introduce additional ITSM processes. They faced a decision to upgrade to the enterprise version of the same on-premise tool, or implement a new solution. In late 2015, Martyn attended an event and listened to customers speaking about Hornbill Service Manager. Martyn said, “I was impressed by the collaborative features and the multi-lingual capabilities. We have teams within the wider parts of the group that support global solutions, so the ability to communicate and collaborate in any language was particularly compelling. We made the decision to implement Hornbill Service Manager in early 2016, but we had to address a major challenge of migrating to this new platform with minimal disruption to our customers. “ Switch-on and go-live Although Hornbill offers a free 30-day trial and switch-on service to set up the system, Martyn recognised that there was a significant amount of work that Idox would have to do to get their data ready for implementation. The old system had no concept of a Service Catalog, so Idox had mapped their products to asset records. This structure had to be redesigned and translated into the new Service Catalog, along with information about customers who subscribed to each service. Over 10,000 customers were using the old Self-Service portal and it was essential that these customers were migrated, so that they could continue to use the new Customer Portal without any disruption to service. Martyn and his team invested the time to prepare and cleanse this data and a Hornbill Product Specialist imported the records. Idox went live with Hornbill Service Manager over a weekend in June 2016, with 120 services defined within the Service Catalog and all customers set up and ready to use the new Customer Portal. Focus on the analyst and the customer experience Martyn makes valid points about the need to focus on the analyst experience. “Our first tier analysts spend their entire day in the system. The old tool had a forms-based environment, so it took a little time for service desk analysts to get used to the new interface, especially the progressive capture. Our service desk teams provided valuable feedback on how to streamline the process. This may only save seconds and a couple of mouse clicks, but when every analyst is logging 70 calls per day, this amounts to a huge amount of time saved. Over 50% off all requests are logged through the Customer Portal and customers are presented with the same series of questions as our analysts, so this feedback has improved the service experience overall.” Promoting Collaboration and making it stick Collaboration can transform an organisation, but as Martyn said, “Getting buy-in from your people is critical for success. Some people will automatically take to a more collaborative way of working, whilst others need more encouragement. With more people using the collaborative workspaces and sharing information, we’re building a fantastic pool of knowledge that previously would have been locked away in a silo, hidden in an email folder or a network share.” To increase the focus on collaboration, Martyn communicates with his teams through the workspaces. “My teams joke that I should have a t-shirt that says…Have you put it in the workspace? However, the benefits are very real, and now, I rarely ever use email for internal communication. I even record the notes of our weekly and monthly meetings in a workspace, so that we can easily search and find information about subjects we have previously discussed. Persistence pays off and our people have now become used to searching the workspaces first, before picking up the phone, or sending an email.” Get your Service Catalog in order Martyn’s advice to other organisations considering Hornbill Service Manager is to get your Service Catalog in order. “If you have an existing service catalog, transitioning to Hornbill Service Manager will be easy. If not, you’ll need to get this in order, before Hornbill’s Product Specialists can spin into high gear with your deployment. You don’t need everything figured out in detail, just start with a good definition of your services and get this in place with your basic workflows. Just get started, as it’s so easy to refine and improve this once the system is live, without impacting your service availability.“ There’s never a good time to upgrade your service desk Although Idox hosts software for their own customers, Martyn still had to convince a few people of the benefits of moving from an on-premise to a SaaS solution. He explains, “An on-premise solution gives you feeling that you have more control, but the onus is on you to configure the solution and manage software upgrades. With a heavy workload and other projects taking priority, there’s never a good time to upgrade your service desk. In the period of time since Hornbill Service Manager went live, we’ve had numerous updates. With continuous deployment, we can immediately start using new functionality that Hornbill delivers. Whether it’s a major or minor update, it only takes seconds, so we can deploy them quickly and know that within a couple of weeks, there will be new functionality available for us to try. With a traditional deployment model, and the disruption that it typically entails, that simply wouldn’t be possible.” Great service and a thriving community Martyn was clearly impressed by the service from Hornbill during the switch-on, and since then in production. “The communication, feedback and support from Hornbill have been fantastic. We’ve received valuable input on the right way to configure the tool and guidance on how to get the most from it. We’ve used the forums to communicate with Hornbill, and with the number of people contributing to the Hornbill community constantly increasing, there’s more valuable information available each day.” Realising the integrated service management strategy Hornbill Service Manager is currently being used by the Public Sector Software division and for change authorisation for managed service customers. The Facilities Management Software division is now on-board and other global implementations are planned for the next 12 months for other parts of the group, who will benefit from multi-lingual capabilities, as well as using a common platform. With so many customer facing teams deploying the tool, the next step will be to deploy Hornbill Service Manager for Corporate IT. Once this is rolled out, Idox will realise its strategy of a common and integrated service management platform for internal and external customers.

Panas improves Customer Experience with Hornbill Service Manager Headquartered in the Netherlands, Panas offers innovative Cloud-based telephony solutions that enable small and mid-sized businesses to communicate more efficiently and cost-effectively. With telephony being such a critical and highly visible service, Panas pays close attention to the effectiveness of its Support teams and the quality of the customer experience. With new services being launched to customers during 2016, Panas wanted to provide a more tailored support experience, based on the services that customers had subscribed to, and the types of requests being logged. The existing Zendesk solution did not provide the flexibility to route customers based on their service subscriptions, so Panas decided to look to the market for an ITSM solution that would support full business process management and service automation. The search for an innovative ITSM solution Alex van Engelen, R&D Engineer at Panas, lead the search for a new service management solution that could be implemented quickly to support the launch of these new services. “I looked at several Service Management tools”, said Alex. “I immediately discounted some vendors, based on price and significant implementation costs. I quickly got my shortlist down to two vendors, Cherwell and TOPdesk. However, for balance, we needed a third vendor, so I searched Google for ITSM and ITIL tools, and found Hornbill. I was impressed by the information available and the videos showing the versatility of Hornbill Service Manager. The collaborative features and the ‘Facebook-like’ social interface left me with the impression that Hornbill was a start-up, with disruptive technology. You don’t expect to see this level of innovation from a vendor that’s been in the ITSM market for over 20 years.” Make the right decision by Investing the time to try, before you buy Alex explained that at the very start of the selection process, Cherwell was the favoured solution. “At the start, we weren’t convinced that we would choose Hornbill. However, they were the only vendor that offered a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, which included a full trial and a free switch-on service that gets you up and running with the tool within 30-days. We invested the time and effort to properly understand the product and get to know the people at Hornbill. During the regular one-to-one sessions with Hornbill’s Product Specialists we got excellent advice on how to get the most from the tool. The knowledge transfer was fantastic, and Hornbill records these sessions, so if you’ve missed anything, or simply want to refresh your knowledge, you can easily revisit a session.” Alex recommends that people invest the time to get the most from the 30-day trial. “It’s a great solution, so make the most of it by getting active and getting to know the people at Hornbill and other customers on the community forums. The advice available is invaluable and the time you’ve invested will pay off. “ By the end of the 30-day evaluation, Hornbill Service Manager was fully configured and ready for use, proving that it was the right choice. Alex explains, “Cherwell wasn’t a true Cloud-based solution. It was quite expensive and there are a lot of up-front implementation costs. Hornbill is a native Cloud-based ITSM solution, which is important, as everything at Panas is Cloud-based. Overall Hornbill costs us less than Zendesk, but offers significantly more flexibility, with full business process management and excellent features for collaboration. In the end, it was easy to convince our executives to choose Hornbill.” Improving the customer experience To provide the best possible customer experience the Customer Portal was translated into Dutch. Alex and his team needed to do some work to tidy up the automatic translations that Hornbill provides. With the new skills acquired during the 30-day evaluation, Alex and his colleagues are now fully self-sufficient. Alex said, “We were having a hard time with the old tool, as it couldn’t direct customers down different routes according to the service against which requests were raised. Now we can ask customers mandatory questions and route requests based on who the customer is, which service they’re using, and the type of request being logged. The process has been streamlined; our customers get a better service experience, and the Service Level Management functionality within Hornbill helps Service Desk staff to properly prioritise their work. We could not have achieved this so quickly if we had chosen another solution.” Collaboration adds a new dimension for service improvement Alex said that Panas is now using the collaborative features of Hornbill Service Manager more extensively. “We’re increasingly making use of the workspaces to share information and knowledge. The ability to mention someone (@name) and bring them in immediately to help with a request is a simple, but very powerful feature. Collaboration is adding a whole new dimension that improves our communication and enables us to support our customers more effectively.”