Ongoing Systems Support

NSL keeps business running smoothly with ongoing systems support

Project: change++ has provided monitoring and reporting systems to NSL for its clients’ use for over 10 years. Through ongoing support, it ensures that any issues relating to business continuity are resolved proactively and immediately.

Services: Ongoing Systems Support

Results: Systems issues are dealt with quickly – often before NSL even realise there is a problem.

The client

NSL is the largest provider of on-street parking management services in the country and delivers a broad range of transport and related services to central and regional government. Its clients include Transport for London and over 60 local authorities.

Their needs

NSL’s monitoring systems are central to its daily operations. Business can be significantly impacted – financially, legally, by customer dissatisfaction or loss of productivity – when a ‘business critical’ system fails. Typical issues that require urgent intervention include errors in data feeds, problems with connectivity or queries around data validation. Sometimes, the numbers “just don’t look right”.

As there are often penalties for service failures or data availability delays built into NSL’s contracts with clients, it needed a partner that could resolve problems as soon as they arose. With clearly defined priority levels and associated response times, it is imperative for all sides that issues are raised and handled in a swift and targeted manner.

What we did

Support has always been a key element of the BI systems development service change++ provides – and was an important factor in NSL’s original decision to work in partnership with our team. Our support model is tailored to suit the needs of each business and, where we have the appropriate skills, we also offer support for any pre-existing systems or applications.

Kristian Grant-Riach, change++ Support Manager notes: “We are very proactive in the way we manage NSL’s queries. There might be an issue with their data ETL processes, so as soon as we hear from a user or get an alert from the ‘automated support dashboard’ that reports out of hours or overnight issues, we jump onto it immediately – usually before anyone’s realised there’s a problem. If it’s a server or resource issue managed by a third-party infrastructure host, we’ll talk to them. We have good relationships with them all and troubleshoot what’s happening.”

Grant-Riach continues, “An additional service we offer to our standard Service Level Agreement is access to our development team as a resource; if someone wants to write some reports but is struggling due to time pressures, or when there’s a lack of experience in-house for more specialist tasks, extra development days mean we can help. Clients have found this really valuable when time is short. There’s a very responsive culture here with a team that really cares about resolving issues impacting on operational business. We’ll do everything we can to ensure disruption to ‘normal service’ is minimised.”

The results

Ongoing support is a major differentiating factor for NSL in choosing a partner. “What we value about the support service at change++,” says Richard Arnold, IT Service Delivery Manager at NSL, “is their willingness and ability to investigate and resolve issues before they impact on our service delivery commitments. We know they’re an agile team of consultants and support analysts; their in-house development team are in close contact with the support team so can react immediately. This is certainly not the case – in my experience – with many other support providers.”