Background: High-ticket volumes, low resourcing
Our client is a thriving clothing and accessories company with more than 2,800 employees and over 300 stores nationwide. Its teams are among the many users of product lifecycle management (PLM) software Centric, benefiting from the easy-to-use interface and collaborative nature of the platform. But, like other organizations with tech stacks that have grown organically over the years, integration challenges had left our client’s IT team dealing with repeated manual fixes and large numbers of IT tickets.
When we began working with our client to provide Centric PLM support services, a single in-house resource was managing a backlog of 120 Centric tickets. For a critical system like Centric, used cross-functionally by the design, merchandising, and production teams, unresolved issues can lead to product delays, impact warehousing, and affect the company’s ability to take a product to market. In short: ticket backlogs can all too easily translate to lost revenue.
The problem:
- 120 tickets in the backlog
- 3 business teams regularly using Centric PLM
- 1 full-time employee to manage all the demands
Our services: Support, maintenance, and process documentation
Knowledgeable, reliable support services can offer a cost-effective way to augment your team and improve service for business users. With iSoftStone’s Centric expertise and 12 years of experience in retail, all we needed was an overview of our client’s business process to begin work.
The first priority: swiftly clearing the backlog. The second: developing a documentation process for our client’s more critical and complex issues. Many of our clients need to focus on higher priorities and simply don’t have the capacity to create documentation. Capturing the root cause, the solution, and any relevant process can help ease workloads for IT and resolve future tickets faster.
Impact: Capacity and stability
Now our client is on the path to a stable process where tickets and issues can be resolved in a timely manner or, even better, prevented from happening. For the first time there’s also capacity for the IT team to proactively explore bigger-picture concerns around how data flows downstream to its commerce, ERP, and retail management systems.
There are qualitative benefits too. Just one additional resource from iSoftStone has created more availability for the team to connect with users about their issues. Concerns can be more quickly understood and addressed — and business users feel seen and heard.
