NHS consortium cuts costs and boosts efficiency with new service desk solution

Avon Information Management and Technology Consortium in the pink after investing in LANDesk solution

Avon Information Management and Technology Consortium (Avon IM&T), a shared service supporting National Health Service (NHS) Bristol, NHS North Somerset and NHS South Gloucestershire, has implemented new technology to manage the increasing number and complexity of calls to its service desk.

As a result, the organisation claims that it has already seen £115,000 worth of productivity savings as it no longer relies on contract staff or has to move senior engineers away from other projects.

The consortium handles 3,000 calls every month and supports 7,000 users.

Over time, the number of calls had increased as the healthcare community was encouraged to move from a paper-based to an electronic working environment. The organisation realised that it required a more sophisticated service desk solution to replace its existing Numara Track-IT call logging system.

“LANDesk had the right mix, look and feel, and if you wanted to make changes to processes it was easy to do,” explained Jason Wallace, head of IT services at Avon IM&T. “The activity through the service has increased 40 per cent. Where LANDesk has helped is that it has identified that growth and is giving demonstrable information.”

He added that the system means more problems can be fixed remotely by service desk technicians rather than by technical engineers working on-site.

In addition, not long after procuring the solution, the consortium was approached by security firm McAfee’s lawyers, who wanted to confirm how many occurrences of its antivirus solutions the organisation had across its estate, against how many its licence permitted it to have.

“Prior to having this solution, I’d have had to send a man out in a van going to all of our sites and taking inventory of the kit. Because of the solution, we could run an asset discovery tool on our software, collate a report and send it to McAfee. It took about two or three hours, whereas previously it would have taken us weeks.”