Fujitsu's help desk

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Automated Process Discovery identifies process optimization opportunities in Fujitsu's help desk operations

About Fujitsu's help desk operations for multi-national clients

Fujitsu manages help desk operations for multi-national companies by providing IT support to their users. While the help desk operations were meeting their customers' Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and satisfaction ratings, the way in which different country support teams executed incident handling processes varied. These inconsistencies led to a business process discovery initiative, to take a closer look at existing processes and identify areas for process optimization.

Visualizing processes "as is" to optimize support incident handling

Fujitsu's primary goal in embarking on this project was to set the stage for continuously optimizing its help desk operations that are delivered as an outsourced service to clients. To this end, the incident handling processes needed to be established and the "typical" and "exception" practices for a wide variety of potential scenarios needed to be identified.

Taking the first step in business process improvement is often the greatest challenge. The traditional approach to getting started with an improvement initiative involves conducting interviews, mapping out processes based on the findings, analyzing what the organization believes is happening, and then trying to make changes to remedy the situation. However, efforts to visualize business processes are typically lengthy, invasive, and error-prone, and can result in optimization efforts that are based on a flawed starting point and hence, often do not meet the original business goals.

Instead, the help desk operations at Fujitsu turned to the company's own Automated Process Discovery service that helps to illuminate the reasons for process exceptions and failure. Rather than making assumptions, the Fujitsu approach relies on facts, and leverages its Business Process Management by Evidence (BPM-e) tool to identify process bottlenecks, detect unauthorized actions, and determine best practices and areas for improvement.

Fujitsu launched a rapid business process discovery exercise using the BPM-e tool to address two key objectives:

• Visualize how the staff that supported different countries followed the established help desk processes
• Deliver specific recommendations to improve SLAs, desk efficiency, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and reduce cost

The starting point: Mapping out how it "really is" based on facts

Fujitsu began by analyzing four months of recent data logs to better understand what was actually happening at the help desks. These revelations were based on the real actions of customer service agents, which were clearly visualized with the Fujitsu BPM-e tool.

First, there was a significant variation in the way the different teams that supported users in various countries followed the incident handling process. For example, the German and French agents were not sending out issue resolution notifications, while the Italian team was not accurately classifying resolutions. As a result, it was possible that the German and Italian teams were under-reporting on their SLAs and hence losing service credits unnecessarily. The Turkish team's high Unique Route Ratio (URR - defined as the ratio of the total number of instances to the total number of unique process routes) of 10.3 meant they followed the process more consistently than the teams that supported other countries. The inconsistency in incident handling across teams was evidence that cross-training was essential and that the process needed to be clearly documented and maintained.

Second, the visualization efforts also pinpointed process inefficiencies. There were incidents with excessive, repeat hand-offs between the help desk and system administration teams - at times, between three and five hand-offs. There also seemed to be a lack of clarity around which documents were required by the off-shore team to resolve a problem, resulting in excessive time spent passing documents back and forth - further indication that training was required across teams to deliver better service to customers.

Third, the business process discovery and visualization exercise also revealed that it was possible for the help desk agents to bypass certain steps in the incident logging system's workflow. Agents were able to override the pre-defined process and skip important steps that they thought were unnecessary or tedious. This was leading to some calls ending up in unattended queues, while essential "fix" information was not captured.

Furthermore, while standard change requests were handled with a reasonable amount of consistency, the process visualization exercise showed the help desk operations that non-standard change requests launched a lengthy, thirteen-step process that could take up to 157 hours to execute. Since non-standard requests were not subject to an SLA, user satisfaction levels could be affected, leaving the help desk operations with no way to measuring the impact.

Benefits from Automated Process Discovery: A fast, accurate view of help desk operation

The business process discovery and visualization exercise included an alignment of findings with implications and recommended actions. One of the key recommendations to the help desk operations was that they continuously track, update, and communicate incident handling processes to ensure that agents have a clear view of the appropriate steps that need to be taken. In addition, process conformance should be reviewed periodically and fed back to the agents to ensure that improvements are sustained.

The entire business process discovery and visualization exercise took only four weeks to complete. The key benefits of the effort were that it:

• Visualized existing processes quickly and delivered additional insight that would have been hard to uncover without the use of the BPM-e tool
• Reduced the risk of service credits
• Increased process effectiveness by bringing to light the need to reduce the number of hand-offs between support personnel
• Increased staff productivity
• Highlighted the need for greater process consistency and training across teams

Next steps: Continuously optimizing business processes

The Automated Process Discovery reports delivered allows the help desk operations to engage in a conversation with the team leaders on the reasons for deviations in the process and the measures that need to be taken to improve processes. The visualized processes also serve as a good start point for process optimization efforts using a Business Process Management platform such as Fujitsu's Interstage Business Process Manager. The output from the business process discovery and visualization efforts can easily be exported to Interstage Business Process Manager where it can be refined, automated, and continuously improved upon.