Business Connexion Ups the Ante With Analytic Environment for Incident Reporting

WebFOCUS Transforms Business Process Management for Technology Services Provider

A successful track record spanning 30 years has made Business Connexion Group Limited a leading systems integrator in the southern hemisphere for innovative business solutions built on information and communications technology (ICT). Based in South Africa and supported by more than 4,000 employees, Business Connexion runs mission-critical ICT systems and manages products, services, and solutions for more than 1,300 clients. The company’s wide client base spans both public and private sectors, from mining to petrochemical organizations, retail to financial institutions.

Business Connexion offers flexible solutions tailored to each client’s business environment with an emphasis on business consulting, communications services, data center management, and information security. The company holds the largest market share in South Africa for ICT outsourcing services and has built its success on aligning its high-caliber services with its clients’ strategic and operational business needs to create customized, well integrated business solutions.

As the number of clients Business Connexion supports increases, so does the pressure to maintain solid customer relationships. Business Connexion often takes calculated risks to invest in new technology solutions, but the company never gambles on the metric that matters most: customer satisfaction.

Using business intelligence (BI) and integration technology from Information Builders, Business Connexion is raising the stakes by deploying an industry-leading BI solution for managing customer service to support incidents. Based on WebFOCUS and powered by iWay DataMigrator and Service Manager, the new BI environment is used to identify and manage employee availability and capacity. This environment streamlines incident management reporting, boosts help desk capabilities, and delivers comprehensive quality management reports throughout Business Connexion.

“Our criteria for a BI platform includes scalability, security, and ease of integration,” asserts Andre van der Merwe, Business Connexion’s senior manager of Services Warranty and Improvement. “It also has to be easy to use. WebFOCUS satisfies all of these requirements.”

The ability to better share information with all those who interface with clients, as well as with the customers themselves, has streamlined related workflows, and helped ensure the delivery of superior service to the company’s client base. Incidents are better prioritized, scheduled, and managed, and staff performance can be better monitored and assessed, ensuring that every customer gets the support they need, when they need it.

Using BI to Improve Business Process Workflow

When Business Connexion first purchased WebFOCUS, the company was drawn to Information Builders’ scalability, ease of deployment, and competitive support costs. Today, van der Merwe and his team are using the BI software as part of an innovative business process management (BPM) project spearheaded by Business Connexion’s reporting team and supported by Fujitsu South Africa.

Mr. van der Merwe heads up the Reporting Division Services Group, which maintains a service management database containing seven years of incident data. Among other things, his group runs reports for more than 1,300 customers, drawing information from their Remedy Service Desk system for their best practice Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certified processes of incident, problem, change, release, configuration, and capacity management.

“With an expanding customer base, we needed a more substantial reporting capability,” says van der Merwe. “WebFOCUS took our reporting to the next level by integrating various process perspectives and performance metrics, a synthesis we could not have achieved with our standard reporting tools.”

By creating a new BPM solution, which incorporates WebFOCUS as the reporting component, Business Connexion is capitalizing on the incident management, service desk, and trouble ticket information it collects on a daily basis. WebFOCUS delivers intelligent, versatile reports to enhance the associated strategic, tactical, and operational processes.

For example, the BPM solution incorporates 16 success factor KPIs as part of its service configuration model, including the average time to resolve incidents, percent of calls escalated to second-level support, average call time with no escalation, percent of incidents miscategorized, percent of incidents reassigned, etc. A process adherence workflow built into the new KPIs helps decrease waiting periods and turnaround times on customer service queries and complaints.

“Eliminating all of the manual activities yields 25 to 30 percent savings in our service management reporting process,” states van der Merwe. “With an upgraded BPM solution, we’ve empowered our staff to work smarter and deliver a far higher level of service to our customers. The WebFOCUS reporting component is a crucial part of the solution.

“Further return on investment was achieved through the implementation of the WebFOCUS environment that we are able to change our business model from a cost model to a profit model,” he adds. “We can now manage the reporting environment as a profitable business unit and a true business asset, realizing sustainable financial growth projected between 10 and 20 percent for the coming years.”

New Back-End Connections for Front-Line Customer Support

Business Connexion stores Remedy data in an Oracle database and uses iWay DataMigrator to extract, transform, and load (ETL) the Oracle data into a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse that has been structured for fast, accurate reporting. The warehouse also includes information from Sybase-based availability management systems and capacity management systems, along with a variety of system monitoring tools.

Van der Merwe credits iWay’s unique ETL architecture and the rapid report development of WebFOCUS for a speedy development cycle. iWay loads the database and WebFOCUS retrieves and analyzes the incident management data. Thanks to Information Builders’ complete and well-integrated set of tools, Business Connexion now has rich, interactive dashboards, portable analytics, and an ad hoc reporting environment that is available to a wide range of employees, managers, analysts, and customers.

“We now have a full picture of the performance and health of the incident management process,” he says. “Workload and priority scheduling is updated daily. Reports are classified and filtered, further driving best practices among Business Connexion employees. Management now knows exactly what every employee is doing at any time. The entire project has been designed using SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) values, which we hope will further align our operations with management’s tactical and strategic goals.”

Boosting Productivity for the Technical Team

The Reporting Division Services Group is excited about the improved BI environment since it saves so much time for database administrators and developers. Previously, developers had to roll up the database tables each month to produce reports, the system now automatically generates reports against one consolidated single source of truth. Database experts previously spent five days each month preparing the data for the monthly run; now DataMigrator loads it automatically and WebFOCUS ReportCaster schedules, runs, and distributes standard reports on scheduled and forecasted changes, SLA performance, active approvals, and status of tasks.

“We can roll out a report to all 1,300 clients and get consistent results,” says Wayne Freeman, a senior developer on contract from Fujitsu Services of South Africa. “We have much clearer visibility across all of the clients. We’re moving beyond incident management and Remedy data to incorporate other data sources as well.”

As a result, Business Connexion can now offer a standard level of quality service to all of its customers, even offering self-service options where appropriate. The WebFOCUS site receives 150,000 hits per month and automatically distributes around 3,000 reports per day, quickly crunching 30 months of data for 1,300 clients and presenting it via easy-to-use dashboards. For example, the Incident Management dashboard summarizes all incidents handled by the various support organizations, with red, yellow, and green shading to indicate total calls logged, total calls resolved, and total SLA violations.

“This level of response gives us a competitive advantage,” asserts van der Merwe. “We can now present a value-added capability that competitors don’t have: a high-value service offering that makes things much easier for clients. WebFOCUS provides an extra level of service and compliance that competing firms can’t offer.”

Having Information Builders and Fujitsu as business partners has consistently boosted Business Connexion’s success. “Fundamentally, we found a solution to our reporting requirements 13 years ago that is still servicing our needs today,” says van der Merwe. “This BPM upgrade is helping us achieve standardization to meet our corporate governance aims. Furthermore, with WebFOCUS, we are now experiencing no duplication of effort, and there is only one version of the truth across the whole company.”