To improve the delivery of Service Desk tasks to its customers, the outsourcer needs to be in a position to centralise as many of the Service Desk activities as possible, consequently allowing it to implement best practise solutions to all of its customers around the clock. If the outsourcer is able to achieve this, the economies of scale resulting from this centralisation will mean that the outsourcer will become further profitable as more and more customers are taken on.

This centralisation is normally phased in. The outsourcer must integrate their central Service Desk application with any other Service Desk application that its customer might be using, this integration being necessary since it will be unlikely that the outsourcer will ever be in a position to take over all of the customers Service Desk functionality to fully support the central systems immediately, due to specific business requirements of the customer and the possible limitations of the installed Infrastructure at the customer site.

Arivia.kom (one of South Africa's major outsourcing companies) was faced with this scenario; they needed to replicate Problem Tickets opened in one of their customers Service Desks into the Arivia Central Unicenter Service Desk where the Problem / Request Tickets could be far more efficiently tracked analysed, and ultimately managed. As there was no permanent network infrastructure between Arivia and this customer they decided to use email as the mechanism to provide the connectivity. The customer's service desk was enhanced to send an email to a specific mailbox in Arivia.kom after a problem or request ticket was successfully opened. X-Email from Project X Technologies was implemented to receive these emails and drive them through a conversion process to ensure that the data going into the Central Unicenter Service Desk complies with the restrictions implemented in the Unicenter Service Desk application.

The solution implemented by Project X consultants facilitates the carrying of attachments from the customer Service Desk to the Arivia Service Desk system and an acknowledgment from the Arivia Unicenter Service Desk back to the customer system. This acknowledgment carries the Unicenter Service Desk Problem / Request reference and this is added to the Ticket in the Customer's Service Desk, allowing full cross reference between the systems.

About Project X Technologies.
Project X Technologies is an independent software and consultancy company that produces cost-effective solutions to today's business challenges. PXT has offices in the United Kingdom and South Africa and has a highly skilled and growing work-force. For more information, visit http://pxti.com

About Arivia.
Arivia.kom is a leading South African provider of integrated business solutions that include the entire spectrum of information technology services. The group’s focus is high-end business technology solutions that support the public sector and large private sector corporates, primarily within the Africa client base.

You can find more information about Arivia on the web: http://www.arivia.co.za