Leading UK bingo retailer Gala Retail called on Devoteam to help it optimise service management and IT performance across its entire operation through a unique, integrated solution involving ServiceNow and CA-Unified Infrastructure Monitoring technologies.
With a staff of 2,500 operating across 138 sites Gala Retail offers a huge variety of gaming options and aims to surpass its main competitor to become the no.1 provider in its field through product innovation, multi-channel development and customer experience.
Main challenges
Addressing complexity of service and system performance
Gala identified a need to review the effectiveness of the technology that underpins its service delivery. With the demerger in 2012 from its parent organisation, GalaCoral Group, the client saw an opportunity to start afresh. The existing solution, Symantec Altiris, was slow, hard to use and offered little reporting that would address their needs. Rather than perpetuate the behaviour dictated by the previous tool, they decided to align ITIL best practices with the processes of a new solution, which would set the bar for their choice.
With our renowned international depth of expertise in service management, Gala chose Devoteam to create an integrated solution that would optimise service across the organisation while guaranteeing best performance of their core technology.
What did we solve?
Integration of ITSM with Service Assurance
ServiceNow was selected for its clear ability to fulfil quickly all of Gala’s requirements as well as offer strengths such as ease of use, functional integration across the ITIL suite, the SaaS model (which means no hosting), its comprehensive reporting and, not least, its constant availability. Gala can consolidate its disparate tool sets, provide a more joined-up and efficient approach to service customers by avoiding costly integrations between bingo halls and online gaming, as well as reduce Opex costs. In the four weeks from product selection Gala was able to offer a fully operational ServiceNow solution for use by all 2,500 personnel.
After three months, 20,000 calls have been logged via ServiceNow’s powerful self-service facility, speeding up fault resolution while decreasing the workload of the service desk. The introduction of an automated set of ITIL modules has improved the triage of tickets, improved the reliability of data, fix times and, most importantly, end user satisfaction.
Integration of ITSM with Service Assurance
As a natural follow-on from the ServiceNow implementation, Gala Retail asked Devoteam to examine server performance levels and recommend a solution that would best fit its needs.
With a complex farm of physical and virtual servers, many of which are dedicated to the core out-of-hours business operation, Gala relies on their optimal performance and high availability.
Only an effective server management solution could protect the business. Drawing on its skill in integration of complementary solutions, Devoteam selected CA’s Unified Infrastructure Monitoring (UIM) as the best fit on top of its ability to integrate with ServiceNow.
Devoteam secured 150 general servers and 20 SQL Server databases. Integration between CA-UIM and ServiceNow has seen improved support triage with alarms to notify of a server failure and trigger automatically a ticket for prioritised repair. The project concluded with knowledge transfer to enable the customer to implement the solution on the remaining servers and manage and support the new environment.
Main benefits
Attaining business goals
Gala has seen accelerated business performance with its new, integrated solution yielding a number of benefits:
- faster fault resolution with decreased service desk workload
- optimised server monitoring across all sites to protect business revenue
- reliable management information on savings and higher productivity
- greater user satisfaction
- a more effective IT department with staff freed up for other assignments.
Guy Peacock concludes: “With Devoteam’s help not only do we have an optimised operation with vastly reduced risk, but we are also left firmly in control of our destiny. Calling on expertise in this type of integration has proved crucial to our business performance and it shows our IT operation in a most favourable light.” Gala is confident of its new business performance and of its quest to attain the no.1 position in gaming retail.
Guy Peacock, Service Desk Team Leader:
“With Devoteam’s excellent help not only do we have an optimised service operation with vastly reduced risk, but we are also left firmly in control of our destiny.”
