SUCCESS STORY: PAR Undergoes a Digital Transformation in ITSM to Improve Their Employee Experience

As a global company that redefined their products for a Cloud-first world, PAR now depends on Provance® IT Service Management and Microsoft Dynamics® 365 to deliver a modern IT service experience to all their employees.

Headquartered in the United States, PAR provides cloud-based Point of Sale (POS), Payment and Food Safety software, hardware, and service solutions to restaurant chains and food retailers across the globe. As the largest supplier of POS systems to the Quick Service Restaurant market, PAR is employing Cloud technology to bring innovation to all corners of restaurant and food retail operations.

Time to Modernize on the Inside

A few years ago, PAR recognized that the world was moving towards the Cloud and they employed advanced Cloud technologies for their own products. “We used Cloud technologies to revolutionize the food retail industry,” said Bernie Salvaggio, Director of Information Technology at PAR. “So, we also decided to look to the Cloud to improve our own internal processes and we shifted from a 30-year-old legacy on-premise ERP and CRM system to Microsoft Dynamics 365.”

Although ITSM was top of mind—their legacy ITSM solution was lacking in modern features such as a self-service portal, ITIL best practices, dashboards, reporting, and automation capabilities—they first built their own solution on SharePoint as they wanted to leverage the Office 365 implementation. “This was the first time an employee at PAR was able to actually submit a ticket to IT,” said Salvaggio. “But our home-grown solution was severely lacking in features, had no extensibility and its own foundation was challenged,” said Salvaggio. “It could be nothing more than a stepping stone towards us evolving to a modern service management experience.”

PAR was also keenly aware that their previous system was not Pink Verified™ and did not incorporate ITIL® best practices. “Being able to standardize on an ITIL compliant solution gives us a framework for managing the services we provide,” said Salvaggio. As an experienced team of IT professionals, they knew they could be doing much better when it came to leveraging industry standards and streamlining IT processes. So, they researched new solutions and discovered Provance ITSM.

How Provance ITSM Meets the Challenges of Their World

“In my mind, when it comes to an ITSM solution, the two most important factors are end-user experience and workflow management,” said Salvaggio, “and we were impressed with how Provance ITSM handles both.”

The PAR IT team believes employees are customers too, and they deliberately chose an ITSM solution that would not only ease the lives of their Service Desk Agents, but that of their colleagues in other departments. “Providing people with an easy-to-use and straightforward way to submit tickets was extremely important. People tend to care about their own problem and not 50 different fields that only matter to IT,” said Salvaggio. “So, I want to make sure we give them that quick and easy way to submit, review status and communicate with us.”

The Provance ITSM Self-Service Portal has an intuitive, simple and easily configurable UI that lets end-users easily submit tickets and check on status. It also provides knowledgebase articles as well as notifications that help deflect tickets or help the Service Desk resolve issues more quickly.

Par was able to quickly take manual processes and digitize them. “We had quite a few processes that still existed on paper,” said Sean Gaffney, Supervisor IT Service Desk at PAR. “One of the first things we did was to convert paper forms for new hires and contractor accounts to service request ticket templates.”

The Provance ITSM ticket templating feature lets IT apply standardization and automation to tickets, which speeds up the opening, triaging and closing of tickets as well as ensuring accurate and important information is collected right from the start.

“What the experience is going to be like for internal IT is just as important,” said Salvaggio. “An ITSM solution must efficiently and effectively support the management of a ticket through its life cycle of initial submission, logging, categorizing, and resolution or fulfillment of requests.”

Provance ITSM business process flows guide users through incident, change and problem management as well as service requests, ensuring consistency and minimizing human error. Automation capabilities can also let IT automate frequent and repetitive tasks, escalate issues as well as route incidents and requests. Provance ITSM lets Service Desk Agents focus by prioritizing tickets, easily seeing what work needs to be done and by when.

PAR IT Undergoes a Digital Transformation

PAR was able to roll out Provance ITSM in less time than expected. First, they were able to adopt approximately 90% of Provance ITSM out-of-the-box, with only a few custom workflows. Second, the internal IT team was able to learn how to use Provance ITSM quickly.

“All our Service Desk Agents were in agreement, Provance ITSM was so easy to use,” said Gaffney. “From what we were using before, it is making their jobs much easier. For example, rather than checking a mailbox, tickets come to them, and if they ever do have to email, it gets tracked within Provance ITSM automatically. All the information they need resides in one place. Our Service Desk Agents are really the heaviest users of the system, constantly working in ITSM, and their feedback has been very positive.”

Third, the PAR employees made the switch from emailing IT to the Self-Service Portal with no issues at all.

“If you think of Excel,” said Salvaggio, “you can create a shopping list, manage a budget or even develop a program. It’s accessible to people at every level and likewise for Provance ITSM. We were able to get Provance ITSM up and running and adopted across the company in an incredibly short period of time. And we’re just scratching the surface. We’re really excited to implement other Provance ITSM features like IT Asset Management, and the integrations to System Center and Azure DevOps. There’s a lot of room to grow and gain value. We’re looking forward to our future.”