Product and Service Cessation

Problem

The client organisation comprises a wide range of multi-sector business units. These feature many diverse work-streams which have numerous complex internal and external functional relationship dependencies. This includes access to inter-business unit infrastructure resources, and potential acquisition of externally provisioned services. Historically, this has presented many difficulties when considering the termination process of such resources and services due to customer or technology refresh driven requirements. Management of the cessation objective was not consistent across the organisation. This inevitably caused inter-business unit communication problems when attempting to discontinue use of resources or services, and the lost revenue potential associated with poor capacity management. It also increased the risks of incorrectly terminating required operational assets, with resultant cost penalties and subsequent negative reputational impact.

Solution

GD worked with the client to develop a dedicated cessation process management system, which would be suitable for adoption across the organisation. This was constructed in a RESOLVE framework and provided the client with a single, easy to use cessation governance toolkit, available to meet the needs of internal personnel and external supplier requirements.

The solution saw the cessation management modules tailored to the client's exact needs. For example, the system employs a templating environment to allow individual business units to fine tune templates to deliver workstream specific requirements, whilst ensuring that these localised modifications still align to general system governance required.

A parent/child ticket management facility allows for a secondary tier of activities (attributed to individuals/work-streams) to be tethered to the primary cessation ticket objective.

The system includes a comprehensive workflow notification engine. This encompasses all cessation milestones, ensuring that progression approvals are recorded and subsequently notified to appropriate parties, for example, the asset owners, change managers, requestors, account managers and more. It also facilitates intervention challenge capability across multiple process gateways, effectively halting the process –temporarily or permanently as is necessary.

Key metrics are harvested from the tickets, such as potential cost savings, returns, hours to deliver the cessation process. Each activity owner feeds back their specific task data which provides significant levels of granularity for overall ticket analytics.

Additional notification tiers can be embedded within the system to generate requirements to update modified system documentation repositories, inform customers, update capacity management systems or other related governance tasks.

This client also purchased this RESOLVE Modules to work alongside this module:

Knowledge Capture

Benefits

• Auditable trail of all cease tickets from inception request to completion.
• Easy to interpret, full process lifecycle mapped in the system, allowing users to track end to end request progression (rather than chasing up with legacy methodologies such as e-mail or phone calls)
• Not reliant on user input to increment process milestones, system provides active governance via email notification for activities such as approval prompting.
• Data extracted from the system provides guidance for informed decision making, for example, whether a cease request is financially viable (for example, it might be more cost effective to leave an asset in situ), or if savings can be expected and what value might be realised in this regard.
• Indicates saving measurement in context of equipment re-use versus new purchase options.