Marval South Africa, a provider of service management (SM) solutions, education and consultancy, has recently announced the release of Xtraction R14.1 – a dashboard and reporting technology developed specifically for SM environments.
This reporting tool complements a variety of SM vendor solutions including Marval MSM, CA Technologies, FrontRange, BMCsoftware, ServiceNow, JIRA, HP, CISCO, LanDesk and Microsoft, allowing companies to drive more value from their SM investment. If no pre-existing connector is available, a generic integration adaptor can be easily customised for various databases including SQL, Oracle, Infomix, Sybase, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
“Reporting is often a challenge for SM users as it is generally complicated to use. Xtraction resolves this issue with simple drag and drop functionality, allowing users to create and generate their own reports. The new features in Xtraction’s latest version deliver expandable and extractable views, further simplifying the report creation process and delivering more actionable insights,” says Edward Carbutt, executive director at Marval South Africa.
Xtraction provides self-service capabilities for the reporting and analysis of IT performance and provides business and IT users with on-demand information that can aid decision making. This reporting function allows organisations to monitor, measure and manage the performance of their SM.
It provides insights into a variety of areas and as such, delivers aggregated value by impacting operations positively and providing strategic and tactical insight. It also drives continual service improvement, delivering better control and direction, allowing companies to meet their business needs.
Xtraction is simple to install and use, ensuring all users can create and extract their own reports quickly and easily. Xtraction allows users to generate standardised reports from information residing in their SM solution in a variety of formats including Word, Excel or PowerPoint for presentations.
Organisations decrease the time spent on creating reports and further decrease the cost of the creation of these reports – tapping into intelligence has never been easier. It can take as little as 45 minutes to implement and be operational.
Xtraction benefits multiple areas within the business – including various IT departments and lines of business by providing deeper insights from an organisation’s SM solution. Reports can be scheduled on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, providing access to insights as and when required.
Furthermore, information can be aggregated by drilling down ‘layers’, making this reporting tool ideal for executives, allowing them to compare performance from one month to another and have this content delivered in an easy to interpret dashboard.
This ensures services are managed more effectively and issues are proactively highlighted and, as such, resolved. The importance of continual service improvement is seen time and time again, delivering additional value to the customer, underpinned by accurate and timely reporting. In addition, filters enable the user to select various information sets within the dashboard, allowing the user to sort information by date, time or specific criteria.
“In order to leverage the full value of an SM solution, an integrated reporting tool that is purpose built for this type of environment is essential. It enhances the Return On Investment (ROI) of investment into SM technology and delivers intelligent business insights that drive continual service improvement. The upshot? Improved productivity, less downtime, tighter adherence to governance requirements and heightened customer satisfaction,” concludes Carbutt.