IT Infrastructure Management Services for a Leading Logistic Company

Kazan, Russian Federation, October 15, 2015 (Newswire.com) - About the Customer
Itella is one of the largest logistics companies in Russia, which provides services for warehouses located in major cities, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, and Novorossiysk.

The company has about 4,000 employees in Russia. The total warehouse area is ​​over 560,000 m². The project was expected to be vast from its beginning, so the tasks appeared to be much more elaborate compared to regular service projects for the remote support of IT infrastructure.
Apart from impeccable quality of services and efficient use of resources, ICL Services succeeded in:

· aligning the IT infrastructure with the corporate standards;

· reducing total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure through efficient redeployment of resources;

· providing support for several major IT infrastructure projects (including development of a new data center in the Moscow region, consolidation of existing infrastructure elements)», - Dmitry Lyzhyn, Head of Data Center and Telecommunications Department ICT Russia, Itella Logistics Itella Corporation.

The main objective of the project was to service Itella’s IT infrastructure which included:

·         infrastructure monitoring;

·         operational and engineering support of servers, databases, storage systems, and virtual infrastructure;

·         end-user support at the first line (Service Desk);

·         support, configuration, and enhancement of the WMS class information systems.

​The Solution

·         ICL Services provides continuous operation of the customer’s infrastructure components, performing routine maintenance of the infrastructure and promptly removing problems that arise.

·         Design works to improve the information systems stability have also been implemented in the scope of the project.

·         It should be noted that the project has been developed to provide 24×7 Service Desk services in two languages ​​(Russian and English).

·         The scope of services included a first line of support which consisted of receiving the calls, processing  and fulfillment of incidents and requests for services. We used effective practices of incident management and service request handling, as well as practices of lean production (Lean).

«I believe that for ICL Services we have become one of the most significant projects in their portfolio. We require only competent and qualified professionals that can to solve challenging tasks and meet demanding requirements for service quality. And the ICL Services has proved to be that team during the project implementation. We are convinced that ICL Services’ experts have the skills required to perform complex and nonstandard tasks in the fastest time, and quickly resolve any incidents without breaking the SLA.

This successful experience of cooperation means we can recommend ICL Services as a first class services provider, and its proposed solutions as qualitative and effective», - Andrey Kuyan, Head of EUS, Itella Russia.

Results

As a result of the cooperation with the ICL Services, Itella has received quality services in accordance with the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Average time of classification and routing of requests has decreased from 7 hours to 30 minutes. Service Desk, available 24x7, completely covers 35% of all requests received on the first line.

Figures:

1. Average quality criteria for the IT infrastructure support for the period of 2011-2014:

• Incident response time – 99.4%;
• Incident resolution – 99.6%;
• Service Request Commencement time – 100%;
• Service Request Fulfillment time – 99.8%

2. A stable reduction trend has been established:

• Average number of incidents per month in 2011 decreased from 147 to 42;
• Average number of service requests decreased from 265 to 56.

3. During the servicing period ICL Services have implemented several projects which included:

• Design and implementation of Oracle Cluster on Red Hat platform in Itella’s data center;
• Design and implementation of MS SQL cluster in the data center;
• Implementation of Grid Control solution which covered customer’s Oracle infrastructure.

ICL Services have implemented a solutions which enabled the monitoring of Wintel and Unix servers in the absence of a unified monitoring system within Itella’s infrastructure. Along with that, ICL Services have proposed and implemented modifications to the infrastructure. In addition, ICL Services have succeeded in building a process approach to change management and optimization of communication between the teams involved in provision of services.

Our experience with implementation of this project has proven that Itella successfully supports and develops its own IT strategy. This helps to maintain efficient management structure in the company and contributes to a comfortable and smooth operation due to well-organized support of IT-systems. In general, cooperation of  Itella in Russia with ICL Services has not only increased the competitiveness of the logistics company in the market, but also added maturity. The company had its processes optimized, and a knowledge base has been accumulated. Thus, Itella has decided to further self-support a part of the processes basing on the services provided by the ICL Services in such fields as Service Desks and infrastructure maintenance.