How to Implement ((OTRS)) Community Edition by Yourself: MVS Group Case
((OTRS)) Community Edition is an open source solution which you can implement almost for free, if you use your in-house team. That’s what the MVS Group did. The company enlisted Radiant System in follow-up works. Read about the results of this partnership in this story.
MVS Group is the largest traffic safety solutions provider operating in Moscow and Moscow region. The company maintains the largest concession in the field of traffic safety in Russia. More than 2 300 traffic enforcement cameras including speed control stations “Safe Region” in Moscow region are maintained by MVS.
The MVS Group mission is to create safe traffic and help State Traffic Safety Inspectorate to minimize road accidents. Due to MVS Group’s equipment Moscow has already cut the accident rate by more than 10% each year.
The Challenge: to Automize New Business Processes
MVS Group has 2 categories of priority tasks:
- Capture camera system installation and set up
- 24/7 support to ensure its successful performance
The incident management system was already installed, and it was a ((OTRS)) Community Edition (OTRS CE for short) based Service Desk. The IT department implemented it on their own.
The next high priority task was to move camera systems to high risk road sections from sections that had low risk of accidents in the last year or more. And STSI has regular asked to move the systems to other places, where the accident rate was high.
Soon the traffic cameras installation and setup tasks’ number progressed to the stage where the need of automatization was obvious.
That’s how one more requirement for system features has appeared. The company needed to automatically manage the reinstall process for IT specialists to move cameras from place to place fast and without data loss. An automated business process would help, on one side, to clearly assign roles while moving the traffic cameras and, on the plus side, to get full control and keep the process transparent.
MVS Group’s IT team was choosing between a few options to reach these goals:
- Develop change management features for current OTRS CE system
- Implement another system: Naumen or Jira
OTRS CE was the final choice. The system had all needed features, no license fee, and an open source code, which would allow changes and following support.
Furthermore, a usual implementation of ready-to-use solution didn’t fit their complex and intricate business processes. MVS Group top management understood that they have to adapt and develop additionally any ready-to-use solution. OTRS CE with its open code was easy to adapt to their needs, as opposed to proprietary products.
As for start resources, the company had a choice between raising internal expertise and searching for the professional contractor. MVS Group chose the second option and decided to contact Radiant System because:
- Radiant System’s team had professional OTRC CE consultants and developers
- The company offered a flexible approach with both a turnkey basis and with unique terms of reference
- The partner was ready to reengineer the already installed system and to further customize it.
The Solution: Strategic Partnership with Radiant System
This project’s nuance was in the further development of an existing solution. The company couldn’t afford to create something from scratch, because they would have to pause all ongoing processes. But what would pause the traffic in dangerous road sections while the cameras aren’t working?
“With OTRS CE we’ve got the desired automatization level with the lowest TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) ever. We found a responsible, flexible and really professional partner in Radiant System. At first, when we couldn’t change Service Desk for the growing business needs, we were ready to drop it and search for another product. But we were lucky to find a partner who didn’t insist on the development from scratch, but agreed to slice and dice our code and recreate the processes. Now we’re ready to develop it further”
Eugeniy Nagaev, IT director MVS Group
Complex audit and consulting
Radiant System team deep dived into MVS Group’s business processes. They optimized the current ones, trained the team, and prepared for the new and complicated change management processes for 3,5 months.
Automatization of complicated business processes
The first two stages of the system development took 3 months. Radiant System along with MVS Group automated the main processes in traffic cameras reinstall. The third stage, the secondary processes automatization, was in progress.
Integration
Current system was bound up with other working processes. OTRS CE was integrated with Telegram (for agent notifications), Jira (for interactions with internal development), Zabbix (the monitoring system), and the external accounting system synchronized with CMDB. Due to these integrations, operators could easily communicate between departments, get all information right away directly from OTRS CE, and handle requests much faster.
SLA control
On the first two stages of process automatization MVS Group set the tracking of departments and contractors work timelines. It allowed to create a clear weekly reporting.
Radiant Customer Portal
MVS Group took the load off the first line of IT support by using a common system, Radiant Customer Portal. It allowed the IT department to communicate with all users, who started to classify their request during its registration.
The Result: Internal Expertise in OTRS CE Improves
Since Service Desk was developed and improved by Radiant System, the number of tickets rapidly increased from 8 000 to 15 000 and the number of agents from 100 to 250, including the headquarters and 5 contractors. Incidents, changes, CMDB, and 8 operation business processes were successfully implemented.
The internal expertise, which the company needed so much during the Service Desk implementing, now shapes in MVS Group actively. Radiant System’s consultants helped to hire OTRS CE specialists and supplied the tech support for each work stage. Now MVS Group’s IT team handles many operational tasks by themselves, and Radiant System can concentrate on dealing with more complicated issues.
Right now the company is finishing the secondary processes in change management and deep integration with the accounting system. Interface customization is the next step. Radiant System is going to make it more user friendly, ergonomic and productive. This bilateral cooperation is good for both sides. MVS Group has a strong partner and an OTRS CE expert, and Radiant System always has unique and original tasks, which always keep the team busy and increase its expertise.
If you have any experience in independent OTRS CE implementation you want to share, please, leave us a comment and tell us about it.
Thanks to our Editor:) Alexandra Khmarskaya
Follow us on Medium to be updated on our news and cases!
