ICL Services

International logistics operator

The Customer used WMS systems, like any other logistics operator. Over time, their custom systems became outdated and difficult to maintain due to incomplete documentation and a lack of competent experts.

The support of those business applications was handled by two experts and a small local team of IT specialists capable of creating simple database requests. They answered user calls and tried to solve their problems at the same time, which is why some of the calls were left unanswered. However, only two experts had the knowledge required to solve complex issues, and other team members would often come and go. When the company made a decision to migrate from one WMS system to another, the Customer's previous support team proved to be not flexible enough.

In the end, the Customer decided to outsource their WMS applications' support to a third-party contractor and contacted ICL Services at the beginning of 2019

Key Challenges

  • Сut the costs for a local WMS support team
  • Build a new support system for business applications
Solution

Implemented our solution

  1. 1) Dedicated first line support.
    Logistics companies live by shipping schedules because a delay of just a few minutes can disturb the order of business processes for an entire day. Any errors when closing the shipment, searching for a product or collecting an order cause extensive delays, and any delay means idle time for personnel or equipment and loss of money for the business. That's why it's so crucial that the employees of logistics companies receive quick feedback from technical experts. One of the Customer's requirements was to leave no more than 5% of their user calls unanswered.

    The first thing the ICL Services team did was changing the structure of the support service. That involved creating a dedicated 1st line support tasked only with registering and transferring user requests. In the past, support staff had been busy trying to solve user issues and could not answer other calls, but that was no longer the case with 1st line support.

    1st line support works 24/7 and deals with any kind of user requests, including those related to other business applications. Four people are doing the job and two others are coordinating the incidents, writing instructions and procedures. Apart from incident management, request routing and solving the requests, the support team also keeps a database, as well as collects and structures the documentation on WMS systems so the Customer can scale their resources without the loss of competencies.

    Transport Management Systems (TMS) are also serviced by 1st line support. The team handles almost a third of all user requests on their own, and the rest are escalated to developers and vendors as per the instructions.

    Important but not urgent situations and difficult incidents are discussed by ICL Services specialists on weekly meetings with a service manager from the Customer's side who is the former head of the technical support department.
  2. 2) Incident, problem and knowledge management.
    Second-line support has four employees who work with issues related to WMS applications. That includes both specialists trained by ICL Services and Customer's employees. That's why it was possible to adopt the service while keeping the expertise, and the Customer did not just make the employees redundant, but transferred them to a technologically advanced company. The transfer of knowledge took place in February–March 2019, and the support service had been fully staffed by May.

    Outside of working hours (every night and on weekends), and on-call person is appointed to handle any urgent incidents the Customer may come across, regardless of their complexity.

    Thanks to ongoing monitoring of databases of WMS applications and servers, it's possible to resolve incidents in a proactive manner, before users report them and without letting them affect the business processes.

    Specialists also automate typical tasks, find the reasons behind repeated incidents and eliminate them by making the necessary changes to programmes or the infrastructure.

    Over the course of several months, ICL Services managed to organise support for a complex and unique service, and changed its structure. Now that support is divided into two lines, users are able to receive feedback sooner, and engineers can focus on solving problems and tough tasks, rather than on communication.

Results

  • By outsourcing their support service, the Customer is able to do without local specialists and now has a manageable and transparent service that helps predict the incident solving time.
  • The company answers 98% of user calls.
  • Every month, 1st line of support receives about 2,000 user requests, 10% of which are urgent.
  • 90% of all requests are tackled by target dates.

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