Alloy Software Helps North Cumbria Overcome IT Challenges of COVID-19

Benefits realized

• Fully integrated multi-faceted solution saves costs through software consolidation
• With top-notch customization, benefits are easily expanded to departments outside IT
• Successfully merged IT operations and processes during challenging reorganization
• Greatly reduced Technical Support costs with expanded use of Self-Service Portal
• Major decrease in resolution times at the Service Desk via workflow automation
• On-board of personnel ease-of-use played critical role during COVID-19 staff increases
• Analytic and resource tools ensured stronger management during COVID-19 crisis
• Flexible workflow engine brought swift process changes during COVID-19 outbreak
• Alloy’s Stay Strong Program provided unlimited licensing through COVID-19 pandemic

Using Alloy Navigator has helped reduce costs, streamlined operations, and increased the effectiveness of IT service delivery throughout the organisation.

Mr. Atkinson adds:

The ability to handle ticketing, purchasing, contract management, and software licensing, all in one tool makes it easy to do away with other software and that saves us on budget. There are also indirect cost savings, including having all of our Digital Healthcare teams working within the same tool brings major efficiencies by helping us work better together.

Alloy Navigator has appealed to some NCIC teams outside of Digital Healthcare functional areas which leads to a greater opportunity for multiple teams, both inside and outside of Digital Healthcare, to collaborate and more effectively communicate.

As a result of our reorganisation, we’ve been able to bring multiple teams into Navigator such as project management, applications, information governance, primary care, business intelligence, risk management, and others. The more we expose the solution to other areas of NCIC, the more we see teams wanting to use it because the advantages are quite clear.

Different teams co-exist seamlessly in the same space because workflow and data can be separated out by team, situation or even shift. We love how easy Navigator is to configure and that it offers such great flexibility in process design. We can do just about anything with it that we want to. Because Navigator is so configurable we were able to easily expand and merge our processes during the reorganisation, but with the conditions surrounding COVID-19 rapidly changing day to day, our ability to quickly improvise by adjusting our workflow on the fly has been invaluable to us.

In addition to cost savings from software consolidation, improved collaboration, and process development, NCIC instantly witnessed the benefits of adopting Navigator’s customer-facing web portal after the reorganisation.

As NCIC scaled their workforce to counter the increased workload associated with COVID-19, Mr Atkinson commented on how the simplicity of Alloy Navigator’s on boarding functionality created much needed relief:

All we had to do was create an account, assign them a role, give them a web address or deploy Alloy Navigator software to them, and they were up and running. In about two minutes they had access to everything they needed for the team they’d be working in, such as dashboards, views, processes, and workflows.

To further aid the on boarding process, Alloy Software’s Stay Strong program, a plan of action designed to alleviate the business, operations and financial impact incurred by COVID-19 made managing resources much easier:

Alloy was very helpful on very short notice, providing us with unlimited licensing at no cost so that we could get more hands on deck faster and keep everything moving.  Alloy Navigator’s powerful analytics toolset empowered us to better manage IT resources, understand staff deficiencies, monitor work being done, and recognize key areas of improvement. We greatly expanded our use of dashboards to maintain a real-time understanding of our IT operations which was an enormous help to our management teams. Navigator gives us unlimited dashboards that can be easily assigned to different roles and whatever information you’d like to show can be displayed in so many different ways providing information to any audience is extremely simple.

In addition to dashboards, we also use scheduled reports and live views which helps us stay up to date with possible trends within our IT operations. Like clockwork, reports automatically arrive in our e-mail as PDFs and that saves everyone, especially managers, a lot of time. The combination of real-time dashboards and views, and scheduled reports, provided the much needed oversight for NCIC during one of the most critical periods in their history.

Given the high volume of IT equipment supported by Digital Healthcare across over a hundred locations in Cumbria in addition to COVID-19 Community Recovery Centres plus the recent surge in laptops for work at home employees, the ability to fully understand assets is also extremely important. Our IT teams manage over 15,000 devices so it’s important for us to know what we have and where we have it at all times. Navigator gathers information right down to the switch port, alerts us of unauthorized software, helps us manage software license compliance, and makes pinpointing the location of devices easy. Given how dependent we are on technology, and how our current demands have skyrocketed, it’s critical that we’re able to manage the infrastructure that makes all of the services we provide possible.