Challenge
A client experiences a problem with one of their supporting software and they need help to improve the software’s performance, including its support and monitoring features. The client wants to be able know how to react to alerts and reduce the number of issues that the software creates, as well as significantly reduce the time it takes to resolve issues raised by the product users.

The cause of the client’s problem was an IBM product called MQSeries, a messaging platform that handles messages between different applications. It is generally used to handle customer service applications, web portals, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. After the product was installed, messages would not always communicate across applications properly, which meant alerts would be sent out to the executives of the company, often in the middle of the night, as many as 200 times per week.

Solution
Infolink took control of the issues by providing a group of well-trained staff to remotely support the client’s site and to figure out how to help prevent problems and handle issues created by their software.

Our staff began by analyzing the issues and discovering their support software generated a couple of hundreds alerts, but most of the alerts were duplicates, and harmless ones at that.

After determining that duplicates were the cause of the problem, the staff applied a method called "tuning" to the supportive software. So when the duplicates were found, they were removed and reconfigured. This prevented those duplicates from creating alerts in the future.

The tuning method helped reduce duplicates from a couple of hundred times per week to only twenty actual problems that needed real attention. We also made sure that we recorded the client’s problem and put it into our databases, so when it came up in the future, we knew what to do to fix the problem.

Alert tuning combined with a professional user support team soon made a huge impact. After seeing a big difference between having issues coming up and not being able to respond to them sometimes for days versus having our team handling and responding to the same issue in a much shorter timeframe, the client was impressed and completely satisfied.

A year and a half later, we spoke to an executive of the client’s company, and learned that he was very pleased with the results and our performance.

“The fact that I’m not being called at 3 am is the most important thing to me. I don’t know what you are doing but no news to me is good news,” said the executive.

By accomplishing our goal — to significantly improve service levels and eliminate support as a source of risk — we were able to extend our contract with this healthcare company for over 6 years.

The end result was that we showed our team has the ability to resolve a client’s problem much more quickly than if they have to do it themselves.