African Bank streamlines internal maintenance with CA solution

African Bank Limited, a subsidiary of JSE Securities Exchange-listed African Bank Investments Limited, has taken steps to improve the levels of technical support it provides to internal users of its computer networks.

It has enlisted the help of Computer Associates (CA) in a bid to centralise its help desk facilities and streamline its network service operations in its regional offices and branches countrywide.

African Bank is the market leader in the provision of unsecured term finance to the formally employed mass market that has traditionally been unable to access credit or related financial services.

The burgeoning growth of African Bank`s business has led to increased support call requests to the organisation`s help desk. With the number of calls reaching the 22 000 per month mark, the bank`s IT and operation executive, Mike King, decided that action was called for.

CA`s Service Desk solution was selected and implemented, giving African Bank the ability to accurately log, escalate and manage support calls from users to the help desk. It is also able to track success rates against predetermined service level benchmarks.

Says King: "African Bank provides first- and second-level support to its users through our help desk facility. More serious problems are outsourced to service providers. Due to the volume of support calls we needed a solution that would allow us to manage calls appropriately and escalate the problems that we cannot handle internally to our suppliers.

"The Service Desk solution gives us these and many additional benefits associated with the management of our infrastructure. Significantly, since implementation, we have deployed software metering to ensure licensing compliance on the desktop.

"In addition, we are able to better manage our assets - both hardware and software - and deliver new software, upgrades and patches remotely via CA`s Unicenter Software Delivery product. This alone has resulted in significant cost savings."

According to King, one of the benefits of the installation of CA Service Desk has been implementing the requirements of new legislation, particularly with regard to the Interception of Communications Act.

"To do this we required data associated with our desk top systems to be centrally managed and information gathering to be automated. CA`s Unicenter Asset Management product achieves this, while helping us to standardise on a number of procedures and processes to give us absolute control over the activities of users. This is necessary to encourage conformity and to ensure only authorised users or employees are operating on the network in the first place.

"We are using the Service Desk solution to assist us with the development of access controls and pop-up screen notifications to staff relating to the appropriate and legal use of e-mail communications and access to the Internet," he says.

"In addition, there are benefits such as the management of our proxy setting and anti virus project roll-outs via Unicenter Asset Management and Unicenter Software Delivery products. These were implemented successfully in a very short time with the assistance of CA."

According to King, the return on investment for the project is expected to be achieved within one year of implementation.

"We now have a completely standardised corporate-wide architecture with comprehensive business and information technology management procedures in place.

"For example, we have been able to integrate problem, request and procurement management within the software, which has also given us the facility to manage change within our architectures and orchestrate the activities of our technology suppliers to the bank`s best advantage.

"Moreover, we have been able to customise the software to accommodate our requirements from a reporting perspective, giving us the ability to build a problem management knowledge base. We also have detail of our own and our suppliers` performances.

"From this data we are able to refine service level agreements, define priority management benchmarks for our technicians, and develop performance and trend reports to assist us with business impact studies."

Turning to the Bank`s Help Desk performance assessment, King notes that call answer times have fallen significantly since the CA implementation. "Call abandon rates have dropped to well below 1%, while a critical measure - the `first time fixed` percentage - is now being achieved in nearly 80% of calls logged.

"We are also very encouraged by the mean time to repair [MTTR] benchmark - in terms of our agreements with suppliers - which is now achieved in 97% of all callouts."

Hannelie de Beer, African Bank`s senior service delivery manager, says that key to the success of the CA software implementation was the "buy-in" by all staff.

"We were fortunate in that our team experienced the `pain` of our previous systems and, due to their efforts in implementing the CA solution, they are now able to reap the benefits.

"We place a significant emphasis on training and are grateful to CA for launching this aspect of the project with CA-hosted `train the trainer` sessions."

Looking to the future, De Beer says additional CA Service Desk system modules will be added to keep pace with the expanding nature of African Bank`s infrastructure and future business needs.

"We are now in a position where we are no longer reliant on CA for assistance as the system is very stable - although they are always available when needed," she adds.