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Kopeyka Manages Business Processes with Axios Systems' assyst

Axios Systems and "KOPEYKA" Trading House, owner of the Kopeyka chain of supermarkets, announce the successful 'go-live' of the second implementation stage of assyst by Axios Systems, which automates additional business critical services with the assyst solution. Kopeyka implemented assyst to manage services provided by different divisions of the company. All IT and non-IT assets are now fed into a federated CMDB.

Kopeyka has developed an advanced approach to ITSM whereby processes have been created to manage business critical services outside IT. The ability to do this was requested by multiple divisions in the company including Marketing, Sales, Facilities, Quality Control and Finance. For each of these divisions, ITIL processes have been adopted and adapted to the particular requirements of the business and synchronized with the functionality of assyst.

At each stage of the project, a separate process has been implemented to tackle a specific business requirement. The respective business customer was actively involved in the implementation, from scoping and development of the technical aspects to final testing and go-live.

The following business service processes have been implemented with the assyst solution by Axios Systems: management of customer requests and facilities (for the supermarkets, management of costs, etc), as well as IT processes, including Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management. In addition, several business processes have also been incorporated, in particular, IT support for the opening of new supermarkets.

A comprehensive reporting system was developed to support management decisions such as budgeting and investments.

Prior to assyst, another platform was used by Kopeyka for Incident Management and some elements of Problem Management. In 2007, an attempt was made to automate business services with the same platform but it quickly became clear that the functionality was not sufficient to fit the requirements set by the business. Moreover, maintaining and developing the existing solution was seen as more expensive than implementing a new system with more flexible functionality. After extensive research, assyst by Axios Systems was chosen as the most flexible and configurable platform with the lowest total cost of ownership.

As a result of the first implementation phase, which only took 3 weeks, the Sales Department gained a flexible tool with which they could control customer feedback. assyst also now enables the Quality Control Department to directly register all complaints regarding the goods purchased in the supermarkets and quality of service in the shops. The system manages feedback to the customer and the necessary steps taken to correct the situation. This has helped the company to increase customer loyalty.

During the second implementation phase, the Facilities Department developed a system to manage requests from the shops. The cost of each maintenance and support activity is now logged in the system. As a result, Facilities have a comprehensive overview of problems for each type of equipment. The system also allows them to monitor the performance of all parties involved in carrying out maintenance – internal as well as outsourcers. This information is used by the Finance Department for budgeting and as the basis for making decisions about purchasing new equipment.

A single federated CMDB is currently being implemented to obtain a consolidated view of all non-IT assets located in more then 500 supermarkets in over 200 towns and cities throughout Russia. In addition, integrating assyst with a Business Intelligence solution that has been used at "Kopeyka" for some time, has enabled them to create a comprehensive reporting system which is used to monitor KPIs for the Service Desk on a weekly basis.

Several business processes have now been standardized with assyst, including IT support for the opening of new shops. Multi-level workflows have been developed which automatically request approvals from the relevant teams with associated timescales and budgets. The workflow also gives control over project timings in accordance with the corresponding SLAs.

The next project phase in 2010 will include the ability for Marketing to manage internal business processes on the basis of feedback from the shops. This will be implemented in assyst through Change Management functionality: the supermarkets will be able to send requests, such as modifications to the product range or improvements of the purchase processes.



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