Home Properties Looks to Implement Service Catalog and Self-Service After Successful First Year Implementing ITIL V3 with Assyst
Herndon, Virginia - Axios Systems, the world's leading independent provider of IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions celebrates the one-year anniversary of a successful implementation of the ITSM solution, assyst, with Home Properties, Inc. (NYSE:HME), a leading real estate development trust, headquartered in Rochester, New York.
Home Properties began its search in 2008 for a new tool which could function with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) principles the company was in the process of adopting. Christina Sanfilippo, PMP Operations Support Director at Home Properties, states, "The implementation of a new software application which we use to run our business, along with application security changes caused our call volume to increase. We had to streamline our processes in order to better support our users."
With the assistance of IT process consultants, Home Properties narrowed down a list of a few select vendors, including Axios Systems. Ultimately, assyst by Axios Systems was chosen as the more holistic solution with more seamless integration of functionality than the competing systems, as well as a more intuitive web user interface, backed by knowledgeable and capable support personnel.
Sanfilippo comments, "We really liked the self-service piece and product roadmap in general; it seemed like Axios knew exactly where the company was going. We also got a good feeling from the pre-sales consultants, as they were extremely straight-forward with us; we felt we could trust them from the beginning."
Following a smooth implementation, assyst went live at Home Properties in November 2009. Since going live, Home Properties has realized a number of benefits, including increased visibility of workflows and the ability to maintain control of established processes.
Business users are now able to log in to assyst to see detailed status updates of workflow tasks. Sanfilippo says, "Before, the business users could only see if a ticket was open, pending or closed. Now, they can look in the assyst Process Designer to see what stage the workflow has reached, what task is pending and who it has been assigned to." The increased visibility has also served as a process improvement tool. Sanfilippo says, "Using assyst's Process Designer, we can see what stages are holding up the workflow and then make changes in those areas to improve the efficiency of the process." In assyst, the organization can now institute more comprehensive workflows and maintain control over their established processes.
Post-implementation, senior management is able to use assyst to report on a number of key metrics to monitor the health of its processes. assyst now enables Home Properties to capture information such as productivity and completion by SLA, average time to close an Incident, how often Incidents lead to Problems and/or Changes, and other valuable insight regarding escalations and diversion of tasks.
In a February 2010 report, Gartner estimates that, "An IT organization that takes 30,000 contacts per year and can drive 20% of those issues to self-service can save between $300,000 and $450,000 per year."[1] It is no surprise then that as 2011 approaches, Home Properties is looking to extract additional value from assyst through implementing the assyst Service Catalog and by expanding self-service.
Markos Symeonides, Executive Vice President at Axios Systems, states "We look forward to continuing a strong and successful relationship with Home Properties. As the need for our exceptional solution, assyst, expands throughout the organization, we will continue to provide the same service and support that impressed Home Properties from the beginning."
[1 Gartner Inc. "Driving the Adoption of IT Self-Service", by David Coyle and Richard Matlus, February 4, 2010.]
About Axios Systems
Axios Systems is a leading provider of IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions. Its customer-centric approach, combined with its award-winning software, enables customers to improve their Service Delivery and Support and deliver Continual Service Improvement (CSI) by helping to align and realign IT services to changing business needs, supporting business processes and improving productivity.
Benefiting from more than 20 years of development and investment around Best Practice principles, Axios Systems' core solution, assyst, built around a market-leading Configuration Management Database (CMDB), intuitively steers users through the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) processes which help organizations transition toward the next generation of ITSM and Service Desks. assyst offers a unique lifecycle approach to ITSM with the integration of all ITIL processes (including Incident, Capacity, Problem, Change, Asset, Configuration and Service Level Management), twelve of which have been verified by Pink Elephant's PinkVERIFY service as compatible with industry best practices (based on ITIL V3), in a fully integrated, out-of-the-box application. It empowers management with a dashboard-based transparent view of real-time performance against Service Level Agreements (SLA), and Operations Level Agreements (OLA).
Implementing assyst into an organization optimizes IT infrastructure efficiency, reduces overheads and lowers the total cost of IT ownership (TCO), helping to ensure a significant return on investment (ROI) with rapid time-to-value. Axios also offers a comprehensive set of consulting and training services to support ITSM best practices in an organization.
Axios is headquartered in the UK, with offices across Europe, the Americas, Middle East and Asia Pacific. Axios' global presence is further strengthened with a worldwide network of partners. For more information, visit: www.axiossystems.com.
About Home Properties
Home Properties is a publicly traded apartment real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns, operates, develops, acquires and rehabilitates apartment communities primarily in selected Northeast and Mid-Atlantic markets. The Company owns and operates 116 apartment communities containing nearly 39,000 apartment units. For more information, visit Home Properties' website at homeproperties.com.
For more information, please contact:
Jessica Baculik
Marketing Associate - North America
Tel (703) 326 9481
Axios Systems
