London Borough of Havering, the third largest borough in the capital, has chosen Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM to support 3,000 council staff. The borough's Business Systems department selected Hornbill's solution from six competitive vendor systems for its functionality and ease of use. Since implementing Supportworks seven months ago, the service desk has improved its customer service by logging and tracking calls more efficiently, releasing the IT team to resolve incidents faster and fix problems at source. The team intends to roll out Hornbill’s Customer SelfService portal which will enable users to check frequently asked questions, log calls and place service requests via a web portal.

According to Brynley Giddings, Service Desk Manager at Havering Council: "During the evaluation process, Supportworks ITSM achieved full marks for functionality, value for money, and ease of use. We also liked the fact that Hornbill's asset management solution, Assetworks, can be fully integrated with Supportworks, and we are looking at doing this in the future. Adopting ITIL best practice methodology has enabled us to streamline our processes - a more structured approach means that we now work more efficiently with fewer resources."

Mr Giddings continued: "Supportworks ITSM provides a much clearer picture of the 3,000 calls we are taking each month. We are able to carry out root cause analysis and identify the common issues, enabling us to respond and resolve incidents more quickly, rather than just fixing the same problems one at a time. With the introduction of Customer SelfService, we hope to provide an even better service to our users."

The Council's business systems staff are currently developing the SelfService portal so that customers will also be able to place orders for new equipment via the portal, where requests will be filtered directly to the procurement team.

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems commented: "Like all businesses, local authorities are increasingly looking to find smarter ways of working. Havering Council has a large community of users and business systems that it relies upon to provide a range of services to the public. The implementation of a service management tool like Supportworks helps the IT department to automate processes, releasing staff to focus on proactive service delivery."

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NOTES TO EDITORS

About London Borough of Havering
London Borough of Havering was created in 1965 as a result of the merger of the former Romford Borough and Hornchurch Urban District Councils. Twenty-first century Havering is a great place for families, with highly rated schools and low rates of crime, while its excellent transport links offer easy access to the rest of Great Britain and mainland Europe. Central London is half an hour away, Stansted, Gatwick and City airports only an hour and the Channel Tunnel is easily accessible – Havering really is the gateway to Europe.