Unisys Africa has achieved ISO 9001:2000 rating for its managed services offering, ensuring that clients enjoy standard service delivery with regular audits, both internal and external.
To achieve the rating, Unisys established a managed services centre at its offices in Sunninghill, containing 30 agents who are available 24x7, handling an average 32 000 calls a month. The centre also houses servers in a protected environment and agents monitor performance and a host of other criteria for customers, ensuring optimum services and availability.
"Offering our clients the quality of standards that ISO reflects means that they can continually expect outstanding service," says Brian Patel, operations manager at Unisys Africa, responsible for managed services.
"Coupled with our existing managed services portfolio for proactively managing distributed IT infrastructures and leveraging our worldwide remote management capabilities, we provide customers with a full range of services from service desk support for management of service events and remote network management to intrusion detection and firewall management."
ISO 9001:2000 is based on eight quality management principles: customer focus, leadership, involvement of people, process approach, system approach to management, continual improvement, factual approach to making decisions and mutually beneficial supplier relationships.
Unisys Africa delivers a host of services from its centre, including application performance management, bandwidth management, database performance management, network monitoring and management, change management, configuration management and many others.
Key to attaining and maintaining its ISO accreditation was the introduction of a trouble ticketing system. Manual ticketing is performed when users call the helpdesk with a problem, while automated ticketing is based on proactive monitoring of defined thresholds.
"If any of the predefined thresholds are exceeded, the management system detects it and automatically logs a trouble ticket on the system and escalations and notifications are also automated. These are defined according to the negotiated client SLA," says Patel. When the problem has been rectified, a system check is done, ensuring that the system is running optimally.
The facility mirrors the global situation in English-speaking countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Amsterdam and the US, among others. This means that if the centre experiences troubles of its own and is completely offline due to any disaster, any of the other facilities will be able to handle its workload.
Share
Editorial contacts