CDESK solution
tailored to UNION

About the company

Union poistovna is a major insurer in the field of travel insurance, a pioneer in individual health insurance and online insurance. It was founded in 1992 and since 1997 has been a subsidiary of the largest Dutch insurance group Achmea. It has a strong position in selected non-life insurance segments as well as a solid roots of life and individual health insurance. In cooperation with its sister company Union zdravotna poistovna, a.s. Union insurance company offers comprehensive solutions in the area of health care for individual clients.

Goal

Given the size of the IT operation, the goal was to automate request management as much as possible. Implementation of ITIL processes, especially for Incident Management and Request Fulfilment, through Release, Change and Deployment Management, including other supporting processes such as Service Level Management, User or Configuration Management. One of the requirements was the measurement of defined KPIs for the optimization of individual processes. Initially, the processes of the core systems of the insurance company had to be covered and gradually the solution was to be extended. The goal was a satisfied internal customer who would know what services and in what quality the information technology provided.

„CDESK has enabled us to monitor and control the implementation of our suppliers’ services, to plan for outages or change deployments. Today, we can monitor process efficiency and people utilization. It has to be said, however, that we have sometimes already encountered development constraints due to the architecture of the solution itself (although largely developed according to Union’s ongoing requirements), with changes requiring significant time and financial costs.“

Erich Hatalčík

Pre-deployment status

UNION did not have a central Service Desk in place. Each department registered IT requests along its own lines. Sometimes only by e-mail, sometimes in simple database records. Because of this, the efficiency of the IT specialists could not be effectively measured and evaluated. They did not have a central database of IT assets and were unable to document the various approval processes for various audits.

Řešení

UNION was looking for a solution that would not be financially demanding and at the same time would meet the defined process and technological requirements. Although the CDESK solution met the first part of the brief, at the time it did not meet the second requirement, especially in IT process management based on ITIL best practice. It was not an easy decision, as similar solutions had already defined specific workflow, rules, or constraints. UNION managers were convinced by the huge effort to comply. The CDESK solution was moving forward in this area, and it was also an excellent opportunity to tailor the product to the exact needs of the insurance company.

CDESK has been successfully deployed and has been used primarily for IT, but has gradually been rolled out in the insurance company to other areas such as HR and facilities management where there are similar processes with IT. Although the number of new tickets is gradually decreasing, this is primarily because users have learned not to enter each request individually, but there are defined contact persons to enter e.g. one bulk incident. The CMDB allows everything from HW, roles, cars, building equipment to be recorded in one place, which has greatly simplified e.g. the planning of recovery costs for the future.

Implementation

The implementation has been very challenging because when something new is being introduced, it is often perceived by staff as a complication. At the same time, CDESK was at its very beginning at the time of implementation and much of the solution was built on inputs and requirements from Union. Thus, the implementation was not only about configuring the application or creating templates, workflows, roles, but also about further development of the application and supporting modules. Vendor support was above and beyond, but it still took more than a year to get CDESK to a state where it could be at least partially used.

Conclusion

The CDESK solution for UNION is continuously evolving and more functionality is being added. As a challenge for the future is the completion of the advance approval flow, advance reporting, separation of change management from other processes, which would allow for additional configuration options within the solution, but also within the configuration database and configuration item bindings.