Olympus, which manufactures opto-digital products, including cameras and medical and life sciences equipment, is seeking a way to optimise IT service delivery to its 420 staff across Australia and New Zealand, encourage greater mobility, and offer full visibility into the status of IT requests, anytime, anywhere, from any device.

Cliff Wheatley, IT operations manager at Olympus, said ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) was the organisation’s preferred, best-practice methodology, with BMC’s Remedyforce the platform to offer a single, transparent view of IT.

“We chose BMC Software because of its clear framework for service delivery and best practice.

“Out-of the-box, Remedyforce is ITIL compliant, something we’ve all been trained on previously, and the technology doesn’t require too much customisation. It has the right workflows, is cloud based, and its open architecture can easily be integrated with other products, now, and in the future. Because it’s built on the Salesforce App Cloud, it also linked directly into our CRM, and our email, so everything can be tracked and recorded seamlessly between IT and the end user.”

Wheatley says prior to Remedyforce, Olympus employees had little to no visibility into the status of their IT requests, and the process of IT service delivery was mostly manual.

And, he adds, rather than logging tickets, Olympus staff would resolve an issue by speaking, phoning, or walking up to the IT team, with the business operating without metrics around IT service delivery and fostering accountability in the team was difficult.

“This was slowly causing mayhem as there was no way to track issues and report back on them. We had no baseline to measure our performance.”

Wheatley says the situation has changed and Remedyforce has provided staff with complete visibility into the status of their jobs, and if Olympus staff request new hardware, they can view the status of their order right through from processing to delivery.  

According to Wheatley, since the rollout of Remedyforce in April, Olympus had seen a 60% decrease in response times back to customers and, to complete work and finish tasks, what used to take 10 days could now be completed in three or four, with jobs older than seven days reduced by more than half.

“Olympus IT had a lot of ‘scale’ jobs that traditionally would take 30 to 40 days to complete. These have now reduced by 50%. And while the workload is the same, the responsiveness of the IT team has dramatically improved.

“IT has now been consolidated into a single platform, where staff don’t need to think about or remember who is working on their specific task, because Remedyforce offers it all in one place.”