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African retail giant, Pick n Pay Group operates close to 2,000 stores across multiple formats in eight countries across southern Africa, including a 49% investment in TM Supermarkets in Zimbabwe. With a 54-year history, Pick n Pay benefits from strong brand loyalty and broad socio-economic appeal within the regions it serves. The Group follows a flexible investment and business model, seeking to find the most effective and appropriate operating model for a particular region; for example, operating company-owned stores, working alongside effective franchisees, or investing in businesses with established partners, while providing management support.
As they continue to transform digitally, Pick n Pay IT, the centralized IT division, was looking to speed up the transition from a pure IT service management (ITSM) model to an all-encompassing SaaS-based enterprise service management (ESM) platform, to streamline the collaboration between support teams, external service providers and consumers of the IT services.
Before 4me Pick n Pay used BMC Remedy for incident management, request fulfillment, problem management, and change management was done via an alternative method, and self-service was not used. Pick n Pay IT decided it was time for a next-generation service management solution to support their ambitions.
With the new solution, Pick n Pay IT wanted to avoid issues around availability, upgrades, and delays on new functionality delivered to the business.
Marius Wiese, IT Manager at Pick n Pay, explains, “We were looking for a cloud solution with better availability and business continuity and an ‘outside-in focus’ or service-oriented solution.
“This new ESM solution would have to provide full workflow automation, including seamless integration with third-party providers while providing us with complete control of service quality and cost. And we wanted ownership of such a platform to be brought back in-house.”
As part of the RFP process, Pick n Pay IT invited all the leading service management vendors. Marius: “After careful consideration, we decided to go for 4me, as the platform ticked all our boxes and some. We were immediately impressed with 4me’s complete enterprise service management solution, including their flexible licensing model.”
Industry
- Retail
Location
- South Africa
Challenges
- Pick n Pay were looking to speed up transition from a pure ITSM model to an all-encompassing SaaS-based ESM platform.
Solution
- ITSM/ESM
“We like the ability to scale license usage up or down from month to month without licenses expiring, the ability to add multiple roles to a single user while only consuming a single license, and the named licenses, which enable better control of the license usage. Also, you don’t need separate modules for everything. It’s all included.”
Marius Wiese, IT Manager at Pick n Pay
“In addition, new updates and features in 4me are pushed out every week and it’s up to us to decide whether to exploit them or not.”
“What was also beneficial was that 4me made it possible to have a QA environment for testing and access to demo environments for training purposes at no additional cost.”
Blue Turtle Technologies helped Pick n Pay with the implementation of 4me. From day one to go live, it took 180 days to implement.
Marius: “The whole project was finished on time and budget. Throughout the process, 4me and Blue Turtle were very responsive to our needs, and we were given easy access to all levels of resources if needed. The trust functionality enabled us to escalate any issues very easily between ourselves, Blue Turtle and 4me, and enabled visibility of updates on these requests, with direct access to 4me if required.”
Virtual classroom train-the-trainer sessions were provided by Blue Turtle and, in combination with the self-training in 4me itself, this worked really well.
- Request Fulfillment
- Incident Management
- Service Level Management
- Change Management
SSO, Active Directory, Control-M, Dynatrace, Navision, In-house web-based applications.
Marius: “Thus far, the process has been seamless, and, after planning and mapping out the deployment of the 4me platform, we were able to switch our 450 support experts and 104 support teams over onto the system within one day.”
Going from a traditional CTI (Category/Type/Item) type approach to a service-centric approach required a change in mindset, but everybody quickly saw the benefits of this switch.
Marius: “What is great is that since we went live with 4me, we’ve been approached by other business teams and employees wanting to adopt the platform, making our life very easy. Everyone likes the user interface and is really impressed with the speed and ease of use, which clearly drives adoption.”
Since Pick n Pay has started using 4me, the reporting and Dashboard have eliminated the reliance on spreadsheets and there is seamless collaboration between support teams and end users.
Marius: “Also, the quick and easy development of small system integrations and onboarding of other business units have provided us with an agile approach in taking on new services.”
“The implementation of 4me has been very successful. There have been no major issues since go live, and all functionality required was delivered on budget and on time. We’ve received very positive feedback from users on the responsiveness of the application and the ease of use. The adoption rate is high, and we have seen a significant interest in self-service usage, which will be a real timesaver when you handle around 35,000 tickets a month.”
Marius Wiese, IT Manager at Pick n Pay
