Reducing Operational Costs with VOSS and ServiceNow
April 23, 2019
Dan Payne, CTO, VOSS Solutions
As CTO at VOSS Solutions, I get to talk to a lot of our partners and customers about their specific needs and requirements. One common theme that comes up with all of them, is the need to cut down on operational costs. This can of course be accomplished in many different ways, but the one strategy all of them are looking at, is automating and streamlining day-to-day moves, adds, changes and deletes (MACDs) in their UC solution. Whether it’s a service provider managing many small customers or a single, large and global enterprise, day-to-day MACDs can consume valuable resources.
Looking at a specific example, we recently engaged a large enterprise who has around 130k users globally, who is planning to migrate and onboard another 70k users over the next year. The company currently employs around 25 resources spread across the major geographies, to field roughly 7,000 MACD requests per month. That means on average one of these operations engineers are executing just over 10 MACDs per day. By the time the enterprise has migrated the remaining 70k users, they will need to employ 45 resources to deal with the increased number of MACDs.
With automation however, it’s possible to execute thousands of MACDs per day and employ a much smaller team that simply maintains the automation and business rules. This team does not need to grow as the size of the enterprise grows.
This level of automation can easily be achieved with VOSS and ServiceNow.
VOSS is VOSS Solutions’ UC management and automation platform that is able to perform MACDs across Cisco, Microsoft and BroadSoft systems (both on-prem and cloud).
ServiceNow is a flexible ITSM platform widely used as both an incident management system and customer portal.
Many of our partners and customers already use ServiceNow, either as an incident management system or as a customer / end user portal. The problem is that these tickets or order requests are still being picked up and executed by operations or support engineers in the background. By integrating ServiceNow with VOSS however, it is possible to automate the execution of these requests, thereby:
- Reducing the number of engineers required to execute MACDs
- Reducing human errors made by operations engineers
- Reducing the turnaround time on ticket requests
- Improving customer satisfaction and stickiness
There are two integration options available:
- Undergo ServiceNow development to integrate with the full featured VOSS REST API
- Leverage the VOSS ServiceNow Integration to poll ServiceNow for new tickets, process and resolve them
The first option is recommended if there is an existing ServiceNow development team in place that can build out the integration and ServiceNow is being used as a customer or end user portal where more complex workflows are being used.
The second option is optimally effective when ServiceNow is used purely as a ticketing system. The VOSS ServiceNow Integration simply polls for new tickets, executes related automation and closes the ticket once completed.
Contact us for more information.
