Introduction
One of the world’s largest chip equipment companies is using Problem management in ServiceNow for managing customer problem tickets and Kovair ALM for managing the releases, development and issues for their products. A solution was required to enhance the capability of Kovair ALM to provide a speedier response to its customers’ issues. Kovair Integration Platform, the Omnibus helped in establishing a seamless data transfer between ServiceNow and Kovair ALM that resulted in quick responses to customer issues and accelerated releases for them.
Their Challenge
As ServiceNow and Kovair ALM were working in silos it was very time consuming for the customer support team to search the resolution of the customer issues in Kovair ALM and provide the information back to the customers. Support team had to always log into Kovair ALM and then search for the issue and its corresponding resolution and release details. These details had to be manually entered in the problem tickets. Any change in the issue release dates in ALM would again require a manual update in the corresponding Problem record in ServiceNow. This was a tedious process resulting in a lot of manual effort, time and additional cost and customer response delays.
The Solution
Kovair had earlier already developed the Issue management process for Kovair ALM . Issues were tracked through delivery packages which had a release go live date based on the releases tagged to them. A Problem entity was created in Kovair with the identical set of attributes present against Problem entity in ServiceNow – SNOW. So once a problem was assigned to the designated group in SNOW, the problem record was made to flow to Kovair ALM using the Kovair Omnibus Integration platform. A workflow would then trigger against the Problem record in Kovair ALM and a task assigned to the L3 Support team to categorize the problem. If the Problem gets categorized as an Issue, then an existing Issue already present in ALM had to be linked with the Problem. If a similar issue does not exist in Kovair ALM, then the issue had to be created and linked with the Problem. As soon as the Issue gets linked with the Problem, Kovair Omnibus would transfer the Issue details back into ServiceNow Problem record. The level 1 customer support personnel would then inform the release date to the customers promptly. In each step, a notification gets triggered to the appropriate support groups working on the Problem ticket. For critical problem tickets, the corresponding issues are prioritized and assigned to ‘Fastrack’ releases so that the fix could be deployed at the earliest.
Once the delivery packages get deployed and the release goes live, the release status would change to ‘implemented’. The L3 support team would then get a notification regarding the same and validate the issues against the release. On successful validation of the Issue, the Issue status would change to Implemented and the corresponding problem gets closed in ALM. Kovair Omnibus would then trigger the service flow to close the Problem record in ServiceNow. Notifications would be triggered to inform the customers regarding the resolution of the Problem tickets in ServiceNow.
Business Values
Following are some of the Key benefits
- Service Desk Manager can review anytime the status of any Issue record using Kovair interface.
- Release Number and Go-Live Date can be tagged with the logged Problem based on the Delivery Package tagged with the Release which reveals the stability of the release.
- Notifications are sent to the relevant users on every status change of a Problem.
- Users can establish and view end-to-end traceability relationships between Problems, Issues, Delivery Packages and Release.
- Reports can be generated which would display Problems resolved after every Release goes live.
Conclusion
The client has successfully implemented Integration of ServiceNow and Kovair ALM using Kovair Omnibus platform and have accelerated the releases significantly. Kovair Omnibus is not only helping them to integrate other tools which they are using today but is working hand in hand with them to ensure that the implementation is correct and successful. Stakeholders of their organization have already started recognizing the benefits achieved through Kovair Omnibus.
- Real-time status of all Issues and Releases
- Single source of information for all teams
- Productivity gains through this integrations and Data Synchronization
While this case study discusses Kovair ALM and SNOW integration, Kovair Omnibus can be adopted for integration with any other ALM Solution of which there are several in the market that are integrated through the Kovair Omnibus to achieve the same outcome
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