Numara's Footprints software gives it flexibility for service desk and other workflows
For the fashion-minded, “chic” is one word that springs to mind when thinking about BCBG Max Azria Group, a high-end women’s retailer. With elegance a brand hallmark, you wouldn’t expect that chaos could reign on the backend.
But that it did, until the company embraced IT service management (ITSM), says Kent Fuller, director of enterprise infrastructure services at BCBG, in Vernon, Calif.
REPORT: A guiding hand for maturing IT processes
When Fuller arrived at BCBG some four years ago, three technicians were operating two distinct corporate and point-of-sale helpdesks supporting approximately 1,500 and 500 users, respectively. The helpdesk system technology was outdated, unsupported and frequently failed. Self-service wasn’t an option, so users submitted all helpdesk requests by phone or via paper forms that they technicians would have to enter manually.
Helpdesk call volume was so high at one time that the technicians could do no troubleshooting or provide any assistance to customers, Fuller says. “All they could do was answer the phone, create a ticket and assign it to level two for troubleshooting,” he describes. Then, when they “came up for air,” they could go through paper forms and enter tickets, he adds.
The processes were so out of whack that sometimes new employees showed up for work before IT ever received requests for appropriate hardware and application access, says Fuller, who is presenting his case study at a helpdesk conference this week.
Fuller says he quickly realized he needed to bring in a customizable ITSM tool that would help solve these problems and enable various workflows. IT already had been trying out Numara Software’s Track-It helpdesk software, so he quickly tested out and implemented that company’s ITSM offering, called Footprints.
“We’re a fashion company. IT isn’t our core business, so getting Max and the other executives to invest a large amount of money in IT wasn’t going to happen. That’s why we liked Footprints, because we could customize it. We didn’t want a canned service desk-only tool,” Fuller says.
“With Footprints,” he adds, “we could develop workflows and start bringing accountability and processes to BCBG.”
Immediately, Fuller oversaw implementation of a self-service operations center, or service desk, and merged the corporate and POS helpdesks for management from the same environment. “We now have nine agents that work from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific time seven days a week,” he says.
But over the years, he’s also used Footprints to develop a number of other workflows, including in support of hiring and purchasing processes, as well as to support facilities moves. IT change management has been a recent Footprints project, through which an operating committee now helps sort through and prioritize the hundreds of requests that previously came into IT directly.
BCBG continues to find new and different uses for the software, he adds, noting a travel project in the works.
“Footprints’ biggest benefit is that it allows us to put processes in place where we had chaos in the past,” Fuller says. “We now have repeatable processes that can be followed and changed as needed.”
