ICL Services

Syngenta

Syngenta is one of the world's leading agricultural companies that produces crop protection systems. The company is headquartered in Basel.

The company is present in more than 90 countries, including Russia with branches and representative offices in Moscow, Voronezh, and 30 other cities across the country. 

The company employs 28,000 people worldwide. When users experience issues with their hardware or software, they usually contact tech support. Tech support for users was provided by a global company. However, the service did not live up to expectations: Russian-speaking employees often faced problems. For example, their complaints were often misinterpreted and redirected to the wrong specialists. The Moscow office decided to reorganize tech support and hire a local contractor. ICL Services together with our strategic partner, VimpelCom, have rebuilt the service structure.

Key Challenges

  • Establish technical support for users, including on-site support
Solution

Implemented our solution

  1. The project was launched in the summer of 2021. In the first month, the ICL Services team learned from the previous service provider and then took on the first and second support lines.

    Before the launch, the company had three on-site engineers in the Moscow office and one in Voronezh. They came to the office only when requests were received, which ultimately had a negative impact on the quality of service.

    Reorganizing the tech support structure

    First of all, the on-site engineer in the Voronezh office had their work schedule redefined. From that point, the employee would work full-time and accept first-line requests. If the problem could not be solved over the phone, they would help employees in their city. If then the Voronezh employee does not have time to process a request to the first support line, on-site engineers from Moscow would handle the request.

    This way, users would be able to talk directly to a specialist who, if necessary, could solve the problem right away.

    In addition to user support and incident resolution, on-site engineers would perform the following tasks:
    • Prepare, issue, and routinely change equipment for in-office and field personnel;
    • Maintain the meeting rooms;
    • Conduct an inventory of the warehouse;
    • Prevent incidents.
    Requests can be received via customer ITSM, phone, and email, as well as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

    Each month, engineers receive about 270 calls and solve more than 300 incidents. Only one call was missed in the 1.5 years that the service has been operational.

    IT infrastructure support

    Besides Moscow and Voronezh, the customer has small offices in other cities. They have no on-site engineers but still need maintenance for their network infrastructure, server rooms, and workstations. The wide geographical presence of its engineers allows ICL Services specialists to support even the most remote locations and prevent hardware downtime.

    In addition, the customer needed to separate the Russian segment of users into a separate network. For this purpose, a separate Active Directory domain was created, configured, and tested. Now, if the Russian division was disconnected from the global network, employees would retain their accounts and be able to continue working. Zabbix monitoring system was deployed to control the work on servers and Active Directory.

    Infrastructure migration planning

    ICL Services has also created migration plans for several solutions.

    • Switching from Office 365 to CommunGate Pro
    • The ICL Services team has switched the email service to a local provider in case the company was to be disconnected from Office 365. CommunGate Pro was chosen as a substitute. It features solutions for email and call management, a calendar, a task tracker, and a file exchange service. The system has been tested and all company employees are now connected to it. The customer can switch to CommunGate Pro at any time without any noticeable impact on business processes.

    • Creating a common corporate network
    • Site-to-Site was set up at the company's flagship offices. The ICL Services team installed servers that connected to the cloud through an IPsec tunnel. This allowed employees to connect to the local network. Other offices will be reconfigured to connect to OpenVPN in the cloud via the existing ZyWall.

    • Corporate VPN via a Russian-based solution
    • To maintain a stable and secure connection to Syngenta's internal corporate resources, ICL Services experts customized a VPN solution using Russian products.

Products and technologies

  • ServiceNow, SimpleOne
  • Microsoft Teams, Zoom
  • Active Directory
  • Microsoft 365
  • OpenVPN

Results

  • We rebuilt tech support for users from the ground up. Now, on-site engineers would handle the first-line support and solve tickets themselves.
  • Dropping the global tech support provider and switching to a one-stop support service allowed the customer to boost the number of calls resolved on the first line and reduce the time it takes to resolve issues. This resulted in less idle time and hardware downtime.
  • By creating a local corporate network and setting up VPN, servers, and services, we allowed employees to work even if they were to be disconnected from the global network.

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