Improving Network Performance & Enhancing Customer Experience for 11 Million customers of a Middle Eastern Bank

During the initiation of the engagement with Microland the customer was facing severe performance issues with its IT solutions leading sub-par productivity & network availability at Branches and ATM locations. Any downtime in the branches and/or ATMs meant significant impact on customer experience, financial losses, and damage to reputation.

The customer’s objective with the engagement was to improve the infrastructure availability and performance at the branch locations and ATMs, and thus in turn to improve its service availability and customer experience. 

Microland had a daunting challenge ahead

• The customer had a large number of sites with multi-vendor network estate & telecom circuits spread across the kingdom
• The customer had a multiple vendor ecosystem for Hardware, software & telecom circuits with different SLAs and absence of complete stakeholder information, vendor management processes in place to validate the adherence of vendor SLAs.
• ITSM processes were resource centric leading to high MTTR & long downtimes at branch locations & ATMs. 
• Lack of standard artefacts like network architecture diagrams, asset database, circuit inventory, process documentation, incident documentation and reporting leading to increased resource dependency. 
• The customer did not have defined processes for handling incidents or projects, no documentation methodology, no concept of continual service improvement which meant performance was not measured, reported, and improved upon. 

The customer is the biggest commercial bank in the kingdom (KSA) and is one of the Top banks in the Middle East with 500+ branch sites and 3000+ ATMs serving over 11 Million customers. 

Microland brought together a team of 100+ highly skilled & certified resources for end-to-end IT management services. The team’s initial objectives were to achieve the below transition and transformation initiatives within 12 months of engagement

• Deploy a 24x7 monitoring & management team to monitor all devices. Deployed 60+ resources across Kingdom to provide remote branch support. One of the first things we did was to standardize monitoring of Network devices by defining alerts, thresholds, and auto ticketing process.
• Creating & updating Network artefacts like network architecture diagrams, asset databases, circuit inventory. Define periodic reviews & updates process for information availability and better service levels.
• Vendor Consolidation as per SIAM framework across all technologies & services
• Defining Outcome-based, SLA driven & process centric service delivery framework. Create a strong service governance team to monitor & ensure adherence to SLAs. The governance team was responsible for periodic reviews, implementing automation opportunities as well as driving continual service improvement plans.
• Due diligence on the IT assets and stakeholder information mapping
• Define reporting policies, mechanisms & templates, and adherence to policies.

With the Customer & Microland goals for Transition & Run services, 

• Microland helped the customer increase business service availability by more than 25% within the 1st year of engagement 
• Within 2 years of engagement, Microland reduced the Mean time to Respond (MTTR) by 75% (from 12 hours to 3 hours). 
• Through proactive monitoring & preventive maintenance, Microland has reduced incidents by 49%.
• SLA achievement is consistently above 98.5% for over 4+ years of engagement.

With improved service availability & quality by Microland, the customer achieved approximately 25% reduction in Total Cost of IT operations. Branch availability for end-users (banking customers) has improved by 38% and over 94% of the customer’s transactions have been successfully executed through alternative delivery channels.