Digital Fuel’s ServiceFlow Drives Computacenter’s “Shared Services Factory” Featuring Standard Suite of Proven IT Elements; Benefits Accrue for Both Company and Customers

From the start, Computacenter, Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services, learned how Digital Fuel’s ServiceFlow IT Service Management (ITSM) software could improve service levels and automate business processes for its core service offerings. What it’s found since then, is how ServiceFlow can actually reduce the cost and effort required to build consistently better services.

Computacenter, headquartered outside London, is a 10,000-employee, £2.5-billion company serving the needs of hundreds of organisations in the U.K., Germany, France, Benelux and beyond. In late 2006, Computacenter began using ServiceFlow as a component of its “Shared Services Factory”, a framework to assure IT best practices for customers by offering services built on standards derived from the company’s most successful projects.

“A key element of ServiceFlow is that once you build something, you can reuse that service for other purposes and customers with relatively minor adjustments,” said Michael Neethling, Service Assurance Manager for Computacenter. “This allows us to take on new customers in a very efficient and cost effective manner, which then translates directly into more attractive pricing for our customers.”

Computacenter has applied its “Shared Services Factory”, powered by ServiceFlow, to customer-facing services ranging from datacentres and first/second-line service desks to application, network and project management and much more. Most services can be assembled using components proven through ServiceFlow, lowering their overall development and implementation cost.

“As an example, one customer’s help desk may require an average speed-to-answer metric of 25 seconds because that is acceptable to their business,” Neethling explains. “But a second customer may need an average answer in 10 seconds. Using our Shared Service Factory with ServiceFlow, we are able to serve both of these customers with the same setup, metrics and methods, automatically adjusted to the different applications of the help desk and different levels of service.”

ServiceFlow is one of the best-known IT Service Management software platforms, ensuring optimal Service Level Management (SLM), reductions in TCO and improved time to value. Neethling points out the application has allowed Computacenter to capitalise on and continually improve its intellectual property and best practices.