Redcentric

Implementing SMAX to streamline service delivery

Introducing OpenText™ Service Management Automation X (SMAX) was a multi-team effort. Regular meetings between all involved staff and leaders ensured the right workflows were put in place from the start to simplify the experience for over 2,000 UK and Northern Ireland-based clients. Specific workflows to support new company acquisitions were designed using SMAX Studio. This user-friendly design tool enables users to create and implement new workflows in hours instead of days or sometimes even weeks. This streamlined process analysis, data loading, and configuration management, ensuring newly acquired clients were quickly onboarded within Redcentric.

The hundreds of service offerings within the SMAX catalog made it easy and simple for users to correctly classify any tickets raised. This allowed an automated workflow to route tickets to the appropriate engineer as fast as possible.

Some Redcentric client contacts, such as transient staff within healthcare clients, don’t have direct access to the SMAX service portal. For those, email integration provided an easy way to submit their tickets, which are then automatically routed within the system for fast resolution. SMAX was also integrated with PagerDuty to further support process automation and incident management.

Supporting clients’ ESG reporting requirements

SMAX is closely integrated with OpenText™ Universal CMDB to easily share configuration and asset data. With over 100,000 configuration items (CIs) managed on behalf of Redcentric clients, providing user-friendly client visibility into the operation of their CIs is a real service value-add. Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager for Redcentric explained, “We created a ‘rack viewer’ module within SMAX. This gives clients simple access to a visualization of a rack containing their IT equipment. It provides the usage information they need to optimize their capacity planning. Using the same tool, clients can also request physical access to their devices managed in any of the seven Redcentric UK datacenters. These requests are automatically routed so that the relevant datacenter staff is aware of the impending client visit and can prepare accordingly.”

The CI visibility is also key for client environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting purposes, as Jackson continued, “We leverage SMAX, Universal CMDB, and other OpenText technology, such as Operations Bridge and Operations Orchestration to closely monitor our environments. Using the SMAX-designed rack viewer we can see exactly what the power consumption and wattage requirements are for each asset. We produce monthly client reports itemizing the carbon offset and footprint to support our clients’ ESG reporting requirements. Our organization is all about sustainability and optimizing the capacity of our datacenters. These previously manual processes would take an inordinate amount of time to complete, so we’re delighted with the SMAX process automation. With the automation in place, we have reduced the ESG reporting time by 60%.”

Integrating non-IT functions in SMAX ensures full transparency

SMAX’s main purpose is to simplify and automate client requests. This extends beyond IT requests to reach many of Redcentric’s non-IT departments. The Finance team leverages SMAX to manage client billing queries and requests. Security staff at the datacenters have a specific SMAX page view that helps manage client visits, ensuring client contacts are automatically sent a confirmation email detailing the identity documents they need to bring to gain access. Redcentric’s HR department uses SMAX to manage its new joiners, movers, and leavers processes. An HR-specific SMAX request is auto-routed to the right departments so that new joiners can be productive from their first day, with appropriate access rights, a configured laptop, mobile, and any other devices they may need.

The Audit department used the information captured in SMAX for ISO recertification. Legal colleagues requested some customization to the standard SMAX contract module which enabled them to easily manage supplier contracts. Sales colleagues managing groups of smaller clients were included in a SMAX workflow that ensured they are in the loop when any client interaction takes place. Service and Support colleagues were given full visibility of service level agreements (SLA) between Redcentric, its clients, and its vendors. When clients report issues, these often involve line outages by telecommunications vendors. With the increased SMAX visibility, Redcentric staff could easily see the status of a line fix and keep clients informed throughout.

Embracing AI to elevate the user experience

Redcentric is excited about the prospect of implementing OpenText™ IT Operations Aviator. This secure, private generative AI (GenAI) virtual agent leverages domain-specific enterprise knowledge to elevate the user experience. It can empower users to resolve routine support and service requests in minutes. It can boost service agent productivity by expediting ticket handling. When agents are given a full ticket context, they can work faster and reduce user wait times.

Jackson commented, “While we are still at the start of our AI journey, we look forward to the benefits that Aviator can bring us. We can layer rich machine learning and AI on top of our data lake leveraging data from SMAX, Operations Bridge, and UCMDB. We also use OpenText™ Network Operations Management (NOM) so that we can holistically track network performance, quality, and traffic to be able to diagnose issues even more effectively. A great use case would be when we have a major line outage. We envision that our AI-driven systems can identify the postcode area and therefore highlight any clients that will be affected by it. SMAX will then auto-generate tickets and link these to a major incident ticket which will be auto-assigned to the correct group for resolution. This alone will be a massive timesaver as the resolution will be totally focused and as efficient as possible.”

The organization also looks to embrace AI to search much more efficiently across disparate internal information sources, such as SharePoint repositories, Google Docs, JIRA, Confluence, and Wikis. This will enable new staff members to get up to speed quickly and provide contextual information to agents, enabling them to reduce the mean time to resolution.