Asset records from various departments in ALVAO Asset Management
The implementation also included the progressive transfer of asset records to Asset Management. Originally, Tipsport managed their assets with tailor-made user services records in SharePoint. The first type of assets that IT started recording in ALVAO were computers, laptops, monitors, and docking stations. “In the case of the Facilities Management department, Lucie Krejčová started to prepare the structure of all buildings and their locations,” says Roman Jakub.
“We really liked the combination of user-friendliness and simplicity in Asset Management, because asset management in competing products was extremely complicated. That’s the great charm of ALVAO,” comments Jan Horný with a smile.
Resource booking
Fleet management was introduced into ALVAO, with the option of booking vehicles for employees. Among other things, additional services have also been set up for each car, such as notification of motorway vignette expiry and servicing inspection dates. “That was another thing that scored very well with task solvers, that ALVAO watches these things for them,” comments Lucie Krejčová.
“During the implementation of ALVAO, we once again appreciated our focus on Microsoft. That included things like the seamless integration with Active Directory, counting users and accounts. I must also mention the flexible and transparent work with access permissions, which can be managed by AD Security groups not only in the application, but also in reporting, which heeds user rights and everyone sees the content they are authorized to see,” praises Jan Horný.
The IT team considers one of the key advantages of ALVAO to be the ability to use electronic handover protocols and the associated progressive move to completely paperless asset records when communicating with staff.
User adoption of ALVAO Service Desk went smoothly
Lucie Krejčová and her team have prepared a campaign to facilitate the adoption of the new system, including short webinars for employees and solvers according to their needs and agendas. For users, 5 golden rules for using the helpdesk were introduced. One of them, for example, was the slogan No ticket, no problem.
User adoption went smoothly thanks to the campaign. The proof was that colleagues began to solve problems through ALVAO that were even half a year old. Lucie Krejčová justifies this by the fact that users now had a tool at hand in which they could solve the problem without knowing who specifically to go to, ALVAO will forward the problem to the right person for them.
As Lucie Krejčová explains, the solution team for facilities management such as maintenance workers, electricians, etc. was quite specific. For those we had to set up a simple process involving just a few clicks, as most of them deal with requests and tasks away from their desks.
“Lucie Krejčová is not only an administrator, but also at the heart of ALVAO development. She has trained all her solvers and is also their support,” adds Jan Horný.
“Big-name competitive solutions have a disadvantage compared to ALVAO – in that you need a whole team of people to manage the tool at all,” comments Jan Horný.
Using ALVAO in Human Resources
Now Tipsport has 900 users, going beyond the original 700. With the ongoing growth of the company, HR processes and services have also been introduced into ALVAO. The first phase was to set up company benefits involved in various services and requests, specifically the reservation of tennis courts and swimming pool cards.
Thanks to the positive response to ALVAO at Tipsport, where other departments saw that ALVAO works and is easy to use, HR decided to fully implement ALVAO in its agendas.
“HR noted how some tiles in the Service Catalogue do not open within ALVAO, but lead directly to another tool. In this way, ALVAO has introduced, e.g. a service for reporting personal circumstance changes, such as a change of surname, which leads directly to the HR tool,” says Lucie Krejčová.
HR formerly used a ready-made workflow for employee onboarding in the K2 program, which was no longer sufficient. Over time, HR saw the possibility of automating processes using ALVAO, because as the company grew, the processes of employee onboarding and leaving became more complex. As time went on, all processes were reconfigured and fully moved to ALVAO.
The intricate process of staff onboarding and leaving began with a year of testing, evaluation, analysis and development. “These are very demanding procedures at our end, because many solution departments are involved,” adds Lucie Krejčová.
After a successful testing period, Tipsport began to manage the onboarding and leaving of employees fully with ALVAO.
Secure management of external workers with ALVAO
One of the agendas that IT solves with the help of ALVAO is the management of external staff and their access to systems where each external worker has to meet certain conditions; all the necessary documents were provided and the approvals process successfully completed.
“In this process, we made good use of the connection between Service Desk and Asset Management, where we already had records of these people, including the scope of their access,” adds Lucie Krejčová. This made it easy for IT to create a tree structure in Asset Management divided up into individual partner companies, with NDAs recorded for them.
“As part of Asset Management, we manage external workers, including the scope of their access to systems. We also deal with issues of access to sensitive data, personal liability, validity of consents, and we have set up regular notifications of the imminent termination of their contracts and their possible extension,” says Lucie Krejčová.
This entire process is also connected to Identity Management (IDM), which eliminates the need to manually edit the domain accounts of external collaborators.
Automatic HW replacement for Users – the Standards Catalogue
Another agenda managed by Tipsport in Asset Management is the right of end users to replace equipment which has a standard replacement period, at defined time intervals. After the interval elapses, users can buy the device for a fraction of the price into their personal ownership as part of employee benefits.
ALVAO has set up a notification where IT verifies the entitlement to a new device and automatically sends the user a link to a catalogue of standardized devices, where they can choose for themselves. Access to the catalogue is limited to those users who are eligible for exchange. This is one of the other advantages in ALVAO, where it is very easy to set individual permissions and accesses.
“We have divided users into groups according to the organizational hierarchy. A developer needs a different piece of kit than an accountant,” comments Lucie Krejčová.
“We have developed standards for individual positions, which are managed by AD groups thanks to integration, which significantly simplifies our work. In fact, the IDm knows where to place the user, so when users open the hardware catalogue, they only see what they’re really entitled to.”
“A nice example of ALVAO’s great flexibility was seen during Covid. For instance, anyone who took their monitor home for home-working simply let us know via a form in the Service Desk,” says Lucie Krejčová.
Conclusion
ALVAO helped Tipsport centralize and streamline the management of IT services and assets across the entire organization. Thanks to the system’s flexibility and easy implementation, Tipsport was able to quickly start using the benefits of ALVAO and progressively expand its use into other departments and areas, such as HR, Buildings and Office Management, Back Office, etc.
“One of the reasons we chose ALVAO was that it follows the trends and strategic direction of Microsoft. When we implemented ALVAO, we appreciated that it was already moving towards cloud technologies at that time, which was key for us,” is how Jan Horný sums it up.
