Manheim consolidates service management, moves to cloud

Manheim has started the process of consolidating its IT service management platform by deploying a cloud-based service desk.

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The Australian automotive remarketing service company's CIO, Philip Thorpe, said he decided to deploy the platform because of its ease of use and simplicity.

“I decided I wanted an instrument that was simple and easy to deploy and wouldn’t need too much internal support to run,” Thorpe told CIO Australia.

Moving to the cloud was also an easy decision for Thorpe, who said the company is in the first phase of rolling out the platform.

“What I’ve decided to do is put in a standardised process on a cloud platform,” he said. “We’re going to roll out in the first phase, the simple processes of incident and problem management and customer self-service.”

Thorpe said he chose to take small steps during the rollout of the project because of the long-term impact it will have on the company.

“Just to help this low-level of maturity in the business, in terms of service delivery and management, we’re going to start off with a bite-size transformation,” he said.

“Then we’ll go through to this next phase of the implementation, which will be around change management and service-level management.”

Thorpe chose to deploy with BMC’s Remedy OnDemand offering after looking at other industry alternatives and deciding against piggybacking on Manheim’s US parent company.

“We looked at VMware… and did the Gartner magic quadrant assessment,” he said. “From my part, I’ve worked with other businesses who have deployed service management and helpdesks, and I saw BMC as being best of breed.”

Thorpe said the nature of the relationship between BMC and Manheim was another reason for his decision to deploy with the vendor.

“I liked the notion of a partnering relationship – it’s not just about buying a software-as-a-service, it’s about partnerships”

With the project set to go live at the end of March, Thorpe said he believes deployment issues will be minimal overall.

“We’re going live at the end of March but the issues would be around change management for the end user and adopting a different way of doing things,” he said “… I can’t foresee any technical issues.”

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