Sedgman has cut its IT service management costs in three by shifting ITSM platforms, according to Sedgman IT Manager, Andrew Reid.
Sedgman is a mining engineering company based in Brisbane with offices globally and mine operation sites across Australia. It has more than 650 staff. Reid said his IT responsibilities include operations, service desk, service management, network, server, engineering applications for the company globally.
“Cost is a key challenge,” Reid told Computerworld Australia. “We’re expected to do more with less.”
Sedgman had been using the ServiceNow ITSM platform for three years, but when its contract was due to expire about one year ago the company decided to take the opportunity to see if it could find a less expensive option.
“We were going through a very serious cost review, and ServiceNow was highlighted as an area where there obviously were costs being incurred,” he said. “We really took that opportunity to review what we were getting out of the tool and decide if it was the right tool for us based on what it was costing us.”
Sedgman simply was not using the wide breath of functionality provided by ServiceNow, making it not worth the added expense, he said.
“ServiceNow in my mind is a great product. But is it a great product for a 650-person company? My view at the time was no.”
Sedgman considered several options, including the cloud-based Front Range HEAT platform. The company had used HEAT before prior to ServiceNow, but at the time HEAT was an on-premise service.
Besides cost, Sedgman liked that the HEAT platform was easy to customise and didn’t require developer experience, Reid said. “Our primary admin for the system is one of our service desk staff.”
Also, HEAT met Sedgman’s wish for a platform that included an intuitive customer portal for self-service and service requests, he said. “The form, design and how you can build is it quite simple.”
“It actually enables you to sit down with the business and you can almost dynamically build the form in front of them, which then gives them this immediate opportunity to provide you with feedback as you’re building it.”
The fact that HEAT ran in the cloud also factored into Sedgman’s decision, since it was something the company had liked about ServiceNow, said Reid.
Cloud platforms are automatically kept up to date, requiring minimal management, he said. In addition, the cloud allows staff to connect to the platform from home, he said.
Sedgman worked with Fusion5 to implement the HEAT platform. Reid said the transition went smoothly.
In the year since implementation, Reid said the ITSM platform has saved the business a significant amount of money.
“From what we had negotiated with HEAT versus what we had renegotiated with ServiceNow, [HEAT] was about half the price.”
And it was about a third of the price compared to the price of the original contract with ServiceNow from three years ago, he said.
“The cost of implementation and the first-year licenses would have been cheaper than one year with ServiceNow.”
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In addition, Sedgman is automating more of its business process using HEAT and reducing its use of paper forms. These include IT requests for hardware, requests for licensed software, mobile device applications and file restorations.
Sedgman is currently preparing to roll out a new automated business process for global procurement and vendor management, he said.
The automated processes have saved a significant amount of time both for users filling out forms and the service desk team having to go back to users for additional information, Reid said.
“The process for you to submit a service request online on this system is two minutes.”
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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