European Healthcare Organisation Improves Quality of IT Services with Marval MSM
Formed in 2003, the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital (SATH) National Health Service (NHS) Trust, is the main provider of acute hospital care for almost 500,000 people from Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin and Mid Wales. The hospital employs around 5,000 people. The department also provides support for a number of external, smaller hospitals, Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and other specialist areas such as orthopaedic hospitals.
The Challenge
Core activities of the SATH Informatics Department, consisting of over 40 personnel, include; IT and infrastructure support, IT development, data analysis and reporting, and IT training. It is also responsible for looking after hardware, everything from configuring and rolling out new PCs, repairing PCs and supporting software applications.
The SATH Trust implemented MSM v12, Marval’s integrated, 100% web-based, ITIL® process compliant and ISO/IEC 20000 compatible software solution, to help achieve its service improvement goals of delivering professional, economic, effective and efficient customer-centric IT support services for its customers.
Giles Madin, Informatics Support Team Manager, explains: “We considered a number of solutions very carefully over a 12-month period and Marval came out on top. The key factors in the decision were a system that we could understand, was scalable and that would help us deliver significant benefits and efficiencies to the IT team and the wider organisation. The fact that MSM is very ITIL centric ticked another box, as we felt it was important to have a framework that would help us work towards a more standardised and ‘best practice’ approach to our IT ‘business activities and operations’. Also, the system crucially had to offer value for money and the supplier we dealt with needed to give us sufficient confidence that they could deliver and meet our needs – both now and in the future.”
The Solution
Like most organisations adopting MSM, SATH has taken the expansive, out-of-the-box functionality as a starting point and complemented it with additional utilities to suit the organisation including linking their own asset discovery tool with Marval MSM’s Asset Discovery Integrator; as well as event management using software that monitors all their systems, picking up critical events and automatically raising those events as requests within MSM.
They are primarily using MSM for incident management, service requests and tasks, but are also making strong inroads in using the product for configuration management. Knowledge management is also an area they are developing, by adding at least one knowledge item into the system per week. In addition, SATH Informatics are also introducing change management in a formalised and structured way. The department has recently set up an Information Change Advisory Board (ICAB) which meets every fortnight to review planned IT changes or potential changes, which will then be mapped against the change process within Marval MSM.
The Result
Giles Madin commented: “In just 6 months we have 30% of our customers regularly using our web self-service portal, particularly for reporting incidents. We have plans for channel ordering of products such as PCs and software through self-service. Self-service streamlines the process; it has reduced the number of phone calls into our Service Desk by 30%, a definite cost benefit. I plan to encourage more of our customers to use self-service and I have set a target of increasing the user base from 30% to 50% within 12 months.”
Personnel using self-service have found it easy and intuitive, particularly the Facebook and Twitter generation.
One area of functionality they have used extensively is Marval’s excellent management reporting and dashboard tool, MSM Xtraction, particularly the ‘real-time’ information. One of the challenges was load-balancing work between two sites. MSM Xtraction’s graphic representation instantly helped them see the number of requests that were going from one site to the other. This enabled them to easily and evenly spread the load of service requests between support personnel, providing a better service to both sites.”
Year-on-year the number of service requests for the department has increased. This in part is due to capturing better information through the tool, but generally, with more services offered they are receiving more requests. Within 12 months the department has received over 42,000 service requests.
Other departments within SATH have discovered that MSM can be used effectively beyond IT Service Management and they can see the benefits to them as well. The tool is being partitioned for their Telecoms department to start using MSM in their own right.
“MSM is an extremely versatile and comprehensive product; there is a huge amount you can do with it to deliver quality services. We chose to use a phased approach, adopting selected processes at a time, which once established, we will look to build on with additional processes”, concludes Giles Madin.