Doyensys is always up for new challenges and interesting projects that come our way. It is a belief that such opportunities give us a platform to demonstrate our capabilities and also enhance our exposure.
When a reputed global organization that stores, protects, and manages other companies’ information and assets came to us for a small project, we didn’t say no. We thought there was a lot to gain from a company that is trusted by more than 225,000 organizations around the world.
Doyensys began working with the company in 2015 with a small support project where 1-2 DBAs from Doyensys started supporting the Company’s tech team for their Oracle products-specifix requirements. What started as a small engagement, turned into a strong association with Doyensys bagging their annual AMS.
The company started working with Doyensys after its internal application went through an R12 upgrade. The new system had too many problem areas that led to frequent escalations. As a result, the backlog of unresolved tickets was huge.
Since the company was supporting hundreds of thousands of other organizations, such delay in application support resulted in the loss of trust from the business users. All these factors combined led to a loss in the revenue for the client.
It was during this time that the company approached Doyensys for providing support. The main objective was to win back the trust of business users by resolving the issues in the application by offering a better service. Improving the ticket SLA to get them under control was another priority at that moment.
After witnessing the quality work of Doyensys’ DBAs, the company decided to extend the AMS contract to us.
Challenges
When the team started working on this project, several hurdles came in our way but the team was successful in resolving them with ease. Here is a list of them.
- Several processes needed improvements to make it smoother for business users.
- The geographical expanse of the client posed a few difficulties. For instance, a few business users were challenging to manage, and a few needed our help in training.
- 24-hours support across the globe meant our offshore/onsite team had to be available round the clock.
- Communicating with the business users from LATM/East Asia region came with its own set of challenges as some of them were non-English speaking.
Solutions
Doyensys proposed and implemented a multi-pronged solution to resolve the problems that were being faced by the company.
Resolving the high influx of tickets
Since the inflow of tickets was huge and rectifying that was the top priority, the team implemented a service-desk ticket assignment process to get it under control. It helped in avoiding ticket duplication, incorrect assignment of tickets, and delays in resolutions. Secondly, the team streamlined the user access verification tas to reduce the response and resolution time.
The team also streamlined the integrations like Rimilia, Cadency, Calipso, Trade shift, Dialer Program, etc. It reduced the AMS dependency, and as a result, the system started recording a lesser number of tickets.
Process improvement
The team identified repetitive tasks and converted more than 20 SOPs. It helped in reducing the ticket resolution time by 50%. New alerts and accesses by CAWA integration facilitated monitoring these processes.
The month-end processes and business integrations were other aspects that needed to be resolved. Doyensys worked on them and some of the business-critical/EOM integration run was reduced from 8 hours to 15 minutes. Moreover, Doyensys was successful in optimizing 99% of month-close processes. We further reduced the number of last-minute bugs with a proactive fix/mock period.
Besides, TLS patches were used to improve key business processes.
Data Accuracy
With AD Workday integration, Doyensys cleaned up the Oracle user accounts and rectified 80% of data discrepancies. Fixed customer/vendor data proactively to avoid issues in interfaces/reports.
User Support
For further benefit of users, Doyensys implemented an AME Approval Hierarchy Fix for Brazil, which removed the tickets on Brazil Iexpense issues. Access control to crucial concurrent programs was given as per SOX advice.
The team also trained business users on Oracle functionalities and period-close processes. Due to this, month-close activities became smoother and faster. The users were made self-reliant by converting data extract and data update requests as concurrent programs.
DBA Support and fixes
The team from Doyensys created separate reporting instances for the performance improvement of Discoverer/GLWand and other high volume reports. They added a new node in FINP01 for IEX nightly collection set performance issue. It helped in reducing the run time from 16 hours to 9 hours.
The team automated the post-step refresh activities for weekly refreshes.
Preventive action was taken for Vertex connectivity issues with EBS for the new node.
The team identified the problem of JSP login and blank page issues and took the necessary steps in production outages.
2 TB of space was released in production instances by resizing huge undo and temp tablespace. Workflow table purge activity was done to gain DB space. Upgraded global instance database from 11g to 12c. Finally, Doyensys implemented the Solix application for archiving historical data.
Impact
With the solutions that Doyensys implemented, the backlog ticket count was reduced from 200+ to 50. The ticket SLA was improved from the 60s to 90s. The carryforward ticket from one month to next month was reduced from 150+ to below 50. The age of open tickets(older than two weeks) was reduced from 50% to below 10%. The use of the CSS tool/data loader has reduced the time of Configuration migration by at least 50%.
Conclusion
Currently, a team of 25 doyens supports this company’s project. However, almost 70 employees have worked on their projects over the years. Doyensys has demonstrated exceptional abilities to resolve key business issues for better financial results and greater customer satisfaction.
