Benefits firm gets new shopping portal

Employee benefits firm Unum has saved £340,000 a year as a result of implementing a self-service portal from desktop management specialist 1E.

The firm has saved money as a result of a significant reduction in the time it takes to deal with its daily helpdesk calls.

The portal, called Shopping, has also seen the time it takes to deal with user requests reduce from between four and six hours to 10 minutes on average.

The portal makes more than 500 pieces of software used by Unum available to the 10,000-strong workforce. Much of the software is custom-written.

The firm had been using Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager solution to support large-scale software distribution and operating system deployments, but ad hoc single requests for new software installs were still being manually managed.

"In the past, when users needed new software they would have contacted our help desk, typically by phone," said Blake Pease, assistant vice president of end-user computing at Unum.

"That request would then have been assigned to an administrator who would have checked for the proper approvals before visiting the user at their desk to initiate the software install."

He added that users had typically waited for between four to six hours for a request to be fulfilled, which may have had an impact on service to clients.

The portal is now handling over 1,200 user-initiated download requests for software every month.

Based on the industry estimate of a standard helpdesk request costing $40, Unum said it is saving $560,000 (£340,000) a year.