Aggressive restoration times for diverse multi-vendor, multi-product environment across 90 locations and 4,000+ computers
Challenge
A state transportation agency sought a vendor partner to provide a thorough and comprehensive maintenance program for desktops, laptops, printers and peripherals. The agency required very aggressive restoration times for its equipment in order to promote its mission of providing security, safety and service through the administration of motor vehicle and tax-related laws for its install base of more than 2,000 users. The requirements included providing hardware maintenance support to a very diverse multi-vendor, multi-product environment across nearly 90 locations statewide to ensure maximum availability and minimal user workflow interruptions. Depending on the severity of the issue, the agency’s Service Level Agreements (SLA) ranged from a minimum of four hours restoration time to a maximum of 12 hours. The requirements also included comprehensive equipment and software audits for the agency’s total equipment population.
Solution
Upon award, NTS worked quickly to form a 15-member technical team for the audit and discovery phases of the engagement. NTS completed the audit within a two-week period, performing most of the work after principal operating hours. The team utilized discovery tools for the majority of the phase, recording some of the information manually, and reported to the agency on the approximately 4,000 devices throughout the state. This audit is the foundation of the agency’s asset database in use today.
NTS formed its maintenance team from key members involved in the discovery phase. These individuals, in addition to having their certifications aligned with the agency’s requirements, provided a key link to the transition phase. NTS team members had formed good working relationships with key members of the agency’s support teams and established unique knowledge of agency facilities across their districts.
NTS strategically placed spare parts and loner units across six districts to ensure maximum uptime, minimal user interruptions, technician productivity and service level compliance. NTS worked with agency representatives to report milestone and daily activity updates during and after the transition.
Benefits
The agency and NTS meet monthly to discuss state government contract performance and SLA compliance. The contracted SLA objective is 90% adherence for all Level I and II service requests. The agency has the benefit of receiving an average SLA compliance score of 98.7% monthly.
Because of high customer satisfaction and our geographical reach, the agency approached NTS to implement similar process improvements to maintain its LAN/Unix printer install base. These printers are highly visible and critical to the agency’s mission as vehicle title and registration documentation is produced with this equipment. Maintenance services were deteriorating, and out-of-scope charges were exceedingly high. NTS was able to add a simple modification to the existing state government contract to provide incremental and very cost-effective services for the printer base. The compliance statistics noted above include this portion of the contract performance.
The agency has been able to leverage our vendor authorizations by utilizing NTS to perform warranty repairs on their equipment consisting of Dell, HP and Lexmark products. This frees their staff to concentrate on their specific lines of business without the need to redispatch calls to the vendor directly or maneuver manufacturer technical support.
Out-of-scope charges have been greatly decreased due to our creative approach, flexibility and local decision-making authority.
