UST Global is a leading provider of end-to-end IT services and BPO solutions for Global 2000 companies. UST global delivers pragmatic IT solutions that allow clients to consistently achieve their most critical business objectives. Currently UST operates in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and India.

Systems outages and service interruptions can bring serious consequences, and IT support staff must be able to respond, communicate and implement long term solutions. For UST high availability and reduced system
downtime in their environment is mission critical, while at the same time reducing costs. It has been understood by UST that to effectively manage system outages and service interruptions, a clearly defined management process" Is imperative. Clearly defined process can save time, money, and bring faster, long term solutions. In a nutshell all support activities have to be consolidated and disciplined. The remote help desk should enable end users to reach out to one, single point of contact (SPOC) for all support incidents, and rely on that contact to provide resolution.

End users may choose an online trouble ticket system, telephone, email, or in some cases, on-site agents. These inquiries should be captured into a centralised database repository, documented, tracked to ensure that it meets negotiated service level agreements, and resolved without requiring the end user to call additional parties. At the helpdesk backend Incident management and Problem management are the two critical synchronized processes which should operate in harmony to reduce the adverse impact of incidents and problems that are caused by errors in the ICT infrastructure and to prevent recurrence of incidents related to these errors. In this pursuit Eureka Technology Partners (Eureka) were called upon to support UST by providing remote help desk support and problem management Functions.

Challenges

- Project covers 6000 desktops and servers
- Offer World class support services at reduced costs to users across 10 countries and different time zones.
- Reduce the number of incidents that may interrupt business.
- Quantify cost savings for the next three years

Eureka Solution

Our fundamental approach to support was based on the ITIL framework and ISO/IEC 20000 standards. Central to this model is the need to form a successful partnership with the customer. This approach seamlessly migrated UST

from the currently managed state to a "Eureka Supported state". Eureka stationed an onsite support engineers in strategic locations to attend to onsite dependencies and to comprehend the remote support centre located in Sri Lanka (HQ).

In addition, Eureka's Problem Management service was offered as a complementary service to Incident Management. This enabled UST's technical teams to isolate recurring incidents and common errors and focus on solving them for good. This service enhanced the approach the technicians used for find out why problems occurred and further enabled UST to keep computer systems working as efficiently as possible.

Eureka incorporated its robust Knowledge base which was populated over a period of 12 years
with the clients existing knowledge base to resolve incidents at a faster rate.

Project Overview

This section of the case study exhibits the several stages which both UST and Eureka went through.

1. UST's Vendor selection process UST had a stringent vendor selection methodology for this project. The following mandatory requirements were laid down for interested vendors.

	Proven track record/Global clients
	ITIL Complaint
	Availability of an existing knowledge base
	Onsite Assessment by UST
	- Assess Service support and Service delivery processes - Assess system security (Physical , Technical and Administrative controls) - Cultural alignment with UST (Service culture)
	Other
	- Ability to support 24X7 - Service reporting structure - Continuous service improvement procedures

2. Eureka's next steps Eureka fulfilled and exceeded all the mandatory requirements set forth by UST and thus project was awarded to Eureka. Upon wining the project Eureka team visited the UST location to determine the following to model its service delivery systems and procedures to meet the foresaid challenges.

	Onsite visit to UST premises to:
	- Assess current system support procedures - Analyze Incident and problem management history - Assess existing knowledge base capabilities - Define KPI's and reporting structure
	Offsite setup (ISO certified NOC – Sri Lanka)
	- Dedicate staff and support premises - Setup facility for UST to monitor support center via webcam
	Offsite support delivery process
	- Establish secure remote connectivity (IPLC/VPN/Log me in) - Setup VoIP infrastructure for communication between remote sites - Service delivery based on ITIL/ ISO 20000 best practices.

3. Methodology to deliver Quantifiable benefits Eureka team used a combination tools like ITIL/ISO standards, six Sigma practices and FMEA techniques to deliver the promised deliverables.

Present Situation
Currently UST has derived the following benefits by out sourcing to Eureka and UST has partnered with Eureka to offer IT infrastructure management services to its clientele

	Reduction of costs by reducing the number of support staff.
	Reduction in the volume of incidents.
	A more effective service desk UST's support teams are be able to resolve a larger number of incidents. First-time fix rate has tremendously increased at the service desk as problem management enables the service desk staff to know how to deal with problems and incidents that have previously been resolved and documented.
	Improved technical support knowledge Eureka Problem Management process is based on the concept of Sharing and learning from the experience of managing enterprise class networks. The process utilises the historical data to identify trends, and the means of minimising failures and of reducing the impact of failures, resulting in improved productivity (knowledge base). The root cause identification was based on the Failure Mode & Effects Analysis (FMEA) which is a well known six sigma tool.