Service Management Improvement Programme

Avon Protection PLC  (Avon) specialises in the engineering and manufacturing protection equipment for military and first responder personnel. As part of Avon’s growth strategy, Avon acquired 3M’s ballistic-protection business, enabling the company to rapidly expand its product portfolio in the Military and First Responder markets.

Based on this acquisition, and an overall vision of creating a global IT Service Management capability that fully aligned IT with business needs, it was a priority for Avon’s CIO to address the following challenges –

• Transition the Avon `Helmets & Armour` business away from 3M Group (and the current Technology Services Agreement), and into the Avon technology estate.
• Transform Avon IT, across all divisions and sites, from local/regional capabilities into a global technology function and centralised capability, to drive improved standards, stability, and cost control.

Avon recognised that support was needed to ensure an effective and achievable strategy was set and that key processes and other supporting capabilities could be established to underpin the desired IT Service Management model the CIO wanted to move towards. iCore was delighted to be selected as Avon’s partner to ensure these goals were achieved and excited to be part of the company’s global IT transformation journey.

Following an initial review of key operational Service Management processes and the capabilities needed to underpin a global Service Management approach, the following processes were designed and documented to provide a foundation for success:

• • Incident Management
  • Service Request Fulfilment
  • Change Management
  • Knowledge Management

As the SD+ toolset would be crucial in all improvements, we reviewed the initial implementation, including how the processes had been configured, and identified opportunities to optimise its effectiveness. This resulted in iCore leading the implementation of enhanced processes in a new instance of the SD+ tool that would better meet Avon’s business needs.

Following successfully deploying the new toolset instance, the focus turned to integrating Incident and Service Request ticketing with two of Avon’s key third-party partners. iCore worked closely with the external teams to fully document the integration’s requirements, use cases, and test plans. This provided the following areas of functionality that would be crucial in ensuring Avon’s objectives were met:

• • Creating, updating, and resolving a request or incident.
  • Receiving an update or resolution from third-party partners.
  • Allowing third-party partners to raise incidents.
  • Sending and receiving attachments with third-party partners.

After this was achieved, iCore worked closely with the Avon and Third-Party teams to develop and improve the integrations, including identifying limitations within the SD+ toolset, raising enhancement requests and developing workarounds where necessary.

iCore’s focus shifted to embedding two further critical processes that Avon needed to develop: Hardware Asset Management (HAM) and Software Asset Management (SAM); and the configuration of the SD+ toolset necessary to support them. Work was carried out with the Avon Infrastructure teams to implement agent-based tooling for the laptop, desktop and server estates inventory and agent-less probes to discover network-connected devices. Foundational, documented procedures and work instructions were produced to support the end-to-end IT Asset Lifecycle, ensuring Avon could fully embed the capabilities and realise the benefits of mature HAM & SAM processes.

At the end of the engagement, iCore worked with the Avon teams to ensure that the processes and SD+ toolset were fully documented and could be supported and continuously improved. This left Avon with the capabilities to ensure that ongoing service management activities and continual service improvement would seamlessly support the achievement of business goals.