The challenge

This healthcare insurance company found that new applications and processes led to an increase in ticket inventory, causing lost productivity due to a high inflow of tickets. Additionally, there was a lack of focus on finding permanent fixes for recurring issues. Instead, on-call activities and maintenance had to work on fixing issues.

Atos was engaged to:

• Permanently fix recurring issues
• Enhance productivity
• Reduce ticket inventory
• Prioritize tasks for teams

The solution

It was important to permanently fix recurring issues to reduce the ticket inventory and meet SLAs for all deliverables. Because this was a production support and maintenance project, it involved work on tickets, on-call activities and maintenance.

The PSM team was divided into Kanban and support teams. The Kanban team was assigned to work on preventive maintenance and Lean tasks, while the support team focused on incidents, on-call deliverables, ad hoc requests and similar issues.

Atos implemented root cause analysis to get a clear picture of the recurring issues and enable faster fixes. The solution also included automating manual tasks to enhance productivity. Impact analysis, system integration testing and estimation were all thoroughly documented in order to enable continuous improvement.

Business benefit

The work by Atos’s PSM team has produced great results and several benefits, including:

• 30% reduction in ticket inventory in the first year
• Reports and processes were automated by implementing Kanban methodology
• 2,500+ hours per month of effort delivered for preventive and Lean projects in Kanban
• More than 100 permanent fixes were moved into production, enhancing productivity.