Netology is a South African company with a core focus on outsourced network support, specialising in networking and related services. As a result, effective customer service is critical to their business. More effective IT service management (ITSM) processes and tools were necessary to assist them with formalising their service management infrastructure and growing the business. They turned to Marval South Africa to provide the solution.

Marval South Africa implemented Marval Service Management (MSM) Essential in August 2013 and went live in September. In the nine months since the implementation Netology has been reaping the benefits.

“Originally we required the solution in order to obtain more accurate information from our database, so that we could provide customers with more detailed reporting and improve our measurements on productivity, efficiency and resource planning. Since implementation we have continually added functionality and increased the number of workflows.

“The system has handled this without issue. We have also aligned the solution to our processes and procedures so that less manual intervention is required,” says Darryl Maroun, MD at Netology.

“We anticipated achieving a number of benefits from the implementation, but our experience with the solution has far exceeded our expectations. All of the goals we wanted to realise from the start have been achieved, and we have been able to implement additional processes that enforce policies for even more accurate reporting.

“By continuously measuring, monitoring, and using historical data for trend prediction and forecasting, we have also been able to adopt a proactive approach to Service Level Agreement (SLA) breaches. This has enabled us to improve customer service by resolving problems quickly, often before the customer even notices something is amiss,” he adds.

With Marval’s MSM Essential solution, Netology is now able to measure on a more granular level, taking reporting beyond merely hours worked and into areas such as performance, efficiency and productivity. This means that training requirements can be immediately identified, and non-technical resources can also be measured.

Netology is now able to provide an overview of performance, productivity and efficiency within the organisation at a departmental level.

The ability to export data has also become important, as Netology’s customers now have increased confidence that the service provider has all of their pertinent data ready and available whenever required.

In addition, the implementation of Marval’s MSM Essential solution and the ability to ensure more efficient processes and a proactive approach has enabled Netology to approach and engage with larger customers, who have more stringent requirements and breach measurements. This expanded market pool has enabled Netology to achieve its secondary goal of growing the business.

“In addition, over the past few months we have streamlined the system to drive business processes – in other words, our workflow now manages processes instead of people, which is more efficient and creates greater continuity and seamless service delivery.

“For example, if one of our engineers is off sick and a client they usually deal with has a problem, the workflow will ensure that someone is always available and that issues are rectified in good time,” Maroun adds.

The MSM solution from Marval South Africa is also keeping Netology on track with its ITIL goals, laying the foundation for further process improvement and more accurate and detailed reporting. By enabling the organisation to make informed decisions about its services and service delivery, Marval is helping Netology to leverage the benefits of continual service improvement.

“Since the implementation of Marval’s MSM Essential solution, Netology have discovered more about their business and have enabled improvements in efficiency and business processes. As a service delivery company, they have seen dramatic improvements in their day-to-day operations, and as they grow towards a more mature environment, Marval South Africa will be there to support them,” says Edward Carbutt, executive director of Marval South Africa, concludes.