Building materials manufacturer Boral has won an award for the best ITIL implementation for 2007 at the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF) of Australia's IT service management awards.

Boral's "Pathways Initiative" is a comprehensive improvement project to consolidate two different corporate functions into one unified process framework.

The project was developed around ITIL and IT service management (ITSM) methodologies.

Before October 2005, IT services and financial services at Boral operated as two distinct corporate functions, supporting a diverse customer base of six Boral business divisions.

Boral recognized that one central point of contact for these services would be simpler and more cost effective across the business units and thus formed Boral shared business services (SBS).

Boral SBS general manager Kelvin McGrath said he knew the company could find a better way to bring all the pieces together.

"Rather than throwing more resources at the problem, we looked for industry best-practice, and ITIL was the answer," McGrath said.

The Pathways Initiative began in October 2005 across Boral SBS to implement the ITIL processes of incident, problem and change management. In addition to process improvements, the Pathways Initiative established an integrated service desk, in-house monitoring of IT infrastructure, and key business services.

Boral's IT process management system is based on HP OpenView.

The integrated Boral SBS service desk handles more than 14,000 calls per month for both IT and business service functions. Each month some 265,000 financial transactions are processed and about 25,000 pays across 70 payrolls are delivered.

To support these services SBS monitors and manages the infrastructure availability of more than 1100 network devices, 800 servers, and 5200 PCs across the enterprise.