Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Solution Support
The Client
The client is a leading energy company whose main activities are exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas, refining and marketing, and petrochemicals. The client strategically outsourced development of their EAI solution to Infosys, including select program management roles.
Business Need
The client had implemented an EAI solution to share information across BUs around the globe.
There was a requirement to provide Level 3 and Level 4 support for the EAI solution. The client's business domain spans a wide geographical territory and correspondingly varying time zones. This aspect, combined with the nature and complexity of the EAI solution, demands 24 X 7 support to enable smooth functioning. A central EAI solution support team was formed to provide Level 3 and Level 4 support for the projects in production as well as in development and testing.
Due to the complex architecture of the EAI solution, the installation procedure was mostly manual, time-consuming and highly error-prone. The process of building and packaging the product was resource (people) and software-specific (environment). Hence there was a need to automate the build, packaging and installations procedures to have a consistent build mechanism and reduce the chances of user errors by having an automated installer. This task was also mandated to the EAI solution support team. This required a well-organized support model in place to assist the user community operating at different versions or patch levels.
Challenge
- The client operates across a wide geographical area
- Thus support had to be provided across these locations on a 24X7 basis
- There was no process of tracking the tickets to closure
- The support work was required to be offshored
- The automatic installer had to be created starting with an incomplete documentation on installation steps
- Build process was to be optimized, starting with a situation where duplicate code was being packaged in different binaries. There was information documented on the content of the binaries. All this had to be figured out
Our Solution
Infosys proposed a support system based on the Global Development Model (GDM). Thus the support team would function from onshore and offshore offices — to provide 24x7, third level support. Onshore support began initially, and the offshore team was set up later. Onshore and offshore teams regularly reviewed tasks, thus knowledge transfer was efficient. It also created a supportive environment offshore.
Process was formulated to track the ticket to resolution/closure. The process was agreed on with the client and documented. Once the process was put in place, it was possible to collect the performance metrics. Root cause analysis of the tickets was implemented regularly and improvements based on the analysis were incorporated. All this information was disclosed to the client and the user community in a status report. Over a period of time, we achieved a significant improvement in the turnaround time.
The support team started with two people manning the support desk at the client location. With an increase in the number of users at various stages of integration and the additional task of streamlining and automating the build and packaging process, the support team has grown to three people each at onshore and offshore sites.
The work done so far on the automatic installer has been received well by the Level 1 and Level 2 support organizations which will ultimately be benefited by this initiative.
Benefits
- All the issues discovered/reported by the users were recorded and tracked. The issues were either resolved depending on the criticality via patches or scheduled to be resolved in future releases
- Improved turnaround time resulting in increased user satisfaction with the support
- Detailed status-reporting to the client and the users
- Automated build system for the product ensuring a consistent build mechanism
- Automated installer for the product resulting in reduced time-to-install and less susceptibility to errors