Mastek streamlines IT service to power global growth

Impact of rapid growth

Mastek is a global enterprise and cloud transformation specialist that engineers excellence for customers across 40 countries, including the UK, Europe, US, Middle East, Asia Pacific and India. It works with some of the world’s biggest governments, retailers, manufacturers and financial service providers. For customers, Mastek ingenuity promises to simplify complex digital transformation projects.

The Mastek proposition has proved a hit. The business, based in India, has grown to 40 offices worldwide. Its headcount is up from 1,200 to 6,000 in the last six years.

Rapid growth is not without its challenges. Mastek now faces many of the same issues as its enterprise customers. The business desires global consistency and local expertise. It wants streamlined operations and process certainty.

Specifically, Mastek wants to identify and automate manual processes, creating more ambitious SLAs and strengthening compliance. This will range from the onboarding of new staff to support for IT issues.

“We wanted to go beyond our original ticketing system,” says Dr. Mahesh Juttiyavar, CIO at Mastek. “Our goal was to have a strong, integrated platform that is self-service based. We wanted to avoid the need for IT to support in every business process.”

Digitalizing processes on an integrated platform

With integration as a priority, Mastek selected ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). This simplifies operations between multiple platforms in everyday use at Mastek, such as Microsoft Teams, Intune, Email etc., says Mahesh: “Another attraction is ITSM’s bi-directional integration that allows apps to perform operations on each other. Most ITSM solutions offer one-way communication, where only one app can perform operations on another app.”

Mastek started by automating processes within internal IT before moving into Human Resources and Finance. Processes as diverse as visitor management, cybersecurity, and application maintenance were consolidated on ServiceNow ITSM as the single system of action.

This would become Mastek’s strategic platform for digital enterprise service delivery. A close working relationship between Mastek and ServiceNow smoothed the deployment journey, Mahesh adds: “ServiceNow has always supported us, helping to validate what we do, ensuring that we are moving in the right way and not negatively impacting anything. There are a few times where ServiceNow got back to us and said, “That is not the best practice approach, you are not leveraging the platform in the right way.”

This engagement helped Mastek develop its in-house ServiceNow expertise. It now has a pool of staff certified and trained on ServiceNow ITSM. Some started as interns at Mastek and, once they completed their university degree, were sent for training at ServiceNow for several months, before returning to Mastek.

Greater efficiency with automation

Today, more than a third of service requests are automated through ServiceNow ITSM. While the company has increased its employee headcount by five times over the last six years, IT has managed increased service levels with just a 15% increase in employee numbers.

“We have digitized our workflows and improved our operational efficiency by 30%. It was the right decision to choose ServiceNow,” says Mahesh. For example, ServiceNow ITSM has transformed productivity levels throughout the company. Instead of multiple touchpoints and different manual processes, users can self-serve a range of functions, whether it is reporting an issue, deploying software, or requesting access for new colleagues.

“Our aim is to eliminate manual repetitive tasks, such as employee profile, ID creation and deletion, software deployment, requesting a letter from HR, or mobile device management access,” says Mahesh.

“We want our employees to focus on value-added work. Manual repetitive tasks will be managed through integration and automation."

The time savings can be dramatic. We have integrated ITSM with a software metering tool which has intelligence of open source, freeware or paid software. Furthermore, we have integrated with Intune to deploy software automatically. Software updates, a process that used to take eight days as human intervention was needed to validate the application and approve the software deployment, now takes just three hours, a 98% reduction in time. Software is automatically identified as either open source, freeware, or commercial software, automatically activating appropriate workflows.

Digitalizing the onboarding of new employees has allowed employees to be productive from the first day at work. Now, once a new employee’s data is captured in the system, an employee ID and email address will be automatically created, and basic access provided—with no manual intervention necessary from IT.

Rapid resolution of IT incidents

For the IT team, IT incidents that previously took a few days to resolve are now resolved within hours. When a server or a service from a server goes down, a monitoring tool automatically identifies it as an incident and pushes that data to the ITSM platform. This then creates a ticket; the automation script will restart the service and the ticket is then closed.

“The automated process means that we’ve reduced the time needed to respond to and resolve problems by 25%,” explains Mahesh. “Compliance has also improved. We now have greater agility in the business operations and faster response to any problems which are coming in. That’s internal workflow innovation.”

Accelerated business transformation

Mastek has integrated ServiceNow with Microsoft Azure Data Lake and Microsoft Power BI to provide service support related dashboards on to the single dashboard. The use of the consolidated Central Dashboard for live monitoring of business analytics, combined with consolidated performance reports for process improvement, has accelerated Mastek’s digital transformation. Mastek has built an analytics platform to identify the top 10 calls, calls that were taking more than 10 days to resolve, and data breached calls, and this has been enhanced through automation, process and technology enhancement.

Going forward, Mastek is identifying additional ways where ServiceNow can streamline and digitalize enterprise-wide service management activities. 

“Our aspiration is for a single source of truth on the ServiceNow platform. We want to achieve 70% digitization in the next three years,” says Mahesh.

“As ServiceNow ITSM platform has greatly improved our internal operational efficiencies, we’re also creating a suite of ServiceNow solutions for our end customers. These will include ServiceNow Operations, ServiceNow Integration and Digitization with Connected World. We want our customers to reap the benefits of business process automation.”