Managed Service

The Greater London Authority wanted to digitise the grant application process for organisations developing and building new homes in London – part of the Homes for Londoners: Affordable Homes Programme aimed at building more than 90,000 affordable homes by 2021. Keytree worked alongside the GLA to develop the Open Project System (OPS) – following stringent agile methodologies. Throughout the life cycle of the project, it was important that the OPS had the correct level of support not only from start to finish but also on an ongoing basis.

The Keytree Managed Service team supported the seamless transition of changes from the project into ‘Business as Usual’ to ensure that the OPS can be operated and supported according to the design with no or very limited risk. The effective cross-team approach between the project and the Keytree Managed Service support team also ensures that the development of new functionality is implemented on a regular and scheduled basis without service disruption.

The streamlined and semi-automated deployment process has reduced the number of required deployments by half and the system outage time has improved significantly. The introduction of new processes and the improvement of existing processes have eliminated weak points and inefficiencies in business operations. The Keytree Managed Service team also created a continuous improvement register – which is continually maintained to capture opportunities to improve service, product and processes.

Keytree delivered the Brakes Driver Delivery mobile application in 2017. This first instalment of the Brakes Transport Management Solution serves as an intermediary between third-parties Ortec, Communigator and Visarc. As the application continues to evolve, and following the second phase of development, the solution now provides live delivery information to the end-user.

Brakes commissioned Keytree Managed Service to support its Transport Management Solution, and provides third line Managed Service support consisting of one ElasticBeanstalk instance for each environment: Development, Quality Assurance, Pre-production and Production plus one API gateway configuration. The Keytree Managed Service team is also responsible for any failure of the service that might arise due to a fault in any one of these components.

Like most incidents, they typically start with an end-user. Brakes Support gathers information about the issue and works with the end-user to see if it can be resolved immediately. If Brakes Support is unable to resolve the issue, the incident is logged with Keytree Managed Services via the Service Desk and accepted by the appropriate Keytree Support team member. Each ticket follows a dual process of monitoring and resolving, therefore once the issue is resolved the incident is closed and the knowledge base and/or FAQ updated accordingly. All incidents, changes and service requests are visible and Keytree’s Service Desk system ensures all are progressed internally.

Godrej is an Indian conglomerate who employ in the region of 30,000 people and operates in sectors as diverse as consumer products, real estate and industrial engineering. Godrej made a strategic decision to divest its UK business in its entirety. As a result, Karium was born – the consumer goods company operating in the health and beauty business. But separating the UK arm of its business meant that Godrej needed to divest, localise and transfer over to Karium all related applications, all of which were in place within the Indian-based organisation.

Keytree were engaged during the commercial negotiations to provide advisory and assurance processes to conclude the divestment and then manage the migration but Karium also required ongoing support as Godrej UK was previously supported by the Godrej India IT function.

Both the cloud strategy and technical architecture was designed to maximise the use of automation and cloud, and minimise the ongoing demand for human operations. Keytree established a Managed Service model providing application, technical and hosting services so Karium did not need to establish their own IT function to support their new data centre and enterprise systems. Keytree’s 24/7 Service Desk is now available to Karium managing Incidents, Service Requests and Change Requests for their core applications and provides a Service Integration And Management service layer for the third-party support providers for Oracle Demantra, a forecasting tool and QlikView, a BI Report platform.