“Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is the most anticipated and respected industry research report and we believe that Gartner’s assessment of the market is a testament to our proven ability to continually innovate and provide value to our clients,” said ClickSoftware’s Chairman and CEO Dr. Moshe BenBassat. “Over the last 12 months, we have experienced significant growth in all of the areas where business success is defined: organic and new customer growth; portfolio expansion through strategic acquisition; and continuous product innovation in terms of technology and delivery. These achievements make us well-positioned to address the four trends, as identified by Gartner, which are driving changes in the field service market,” he continued.

Read the full article at: http://tinyurl.com/29jfope

• 17th June

• 29th June

10 Steps to increase performance and client satisfaction while reducing costs & risk

The “nuts and bolts” of Incident, Problem, Knowledge and Service Level Management in IT Service Operations

Incident, Problem and Knowledge management are at the heart of customer support and are essential to support organizations transitioning to ITIL. A systematic approach will be discussed to reduce Time-To-Close, increase First Time Fix rate, reduce No Fault Found, increase Customer Satisfaction and lower the cost of operating your organization. You will learn about the available Tivoli solutions that include best practices for improving the performance of the support organizations.

Workshop description

The workshop covers basic ITIL® processes and several core competences for an IT Service Operations environment, including:

• Trends in the industry; the importance of a Service Desk
• Definition of the goals you want to achieve with your Service Desk; does your company need a single point of contact service desk, or do you need customer service level compliance?
• Definition of the benefits you want to achieve with the implementation of a Service Desk solution
• Definition of the ITIL® processes you will (initially) support; is it necessary to implement the whole of ITIL®?
• Determine the type of Service Desk you need; How mature is the current Service Desk?
• Definition of the tasks the Service Desk needs to fulfil; what is the impact of these tasks on the Service Desk?
• How to set-up Key Performance Indicator’s and how to measure these
• What are the your reporting requirements?
• How are you going to manage customer satisfaction?
• Determine the ITIL experience already available within the company

You will learn about the proven methodology for the implementation of Tivoli Foundation Service Manager into an IT support organization to improve its performance.

What you will learn

During this workshop you will learn to determine what is required to successfully implement a Service Desk solution, embedding best practices and the core concepts of ITIL®. You will also learn the Service Desk analysis process and models and pre-requisites for a successful implementation of Tivoli Foundation Service Manager in an IT Service Operations environment.

* ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries

 
Workshop agenda

Setting the Scene — the workshop begins by discussing whether ITIL® V3 is a framework or a methodology and how defining the correct approach is important. We will quickly overview several of the ITIL® process and functions, and finish the section by exploring the reasons why you may choose to not fully implement ITIL®.

Process Design — if you are going to implement ITIL® you will need a straightforward method to build your ITIL® processes which is why we start with process design. We will discuss best practices and how these are embedded in the available tools.

Monitoring ITIL® Processes — once we know how to build our processes we now need to ensure that we can successfully monitor them for both performance and quality.

Building ITIL® Processes — now we know how to design our processes and how to monitor them we will support you in determining the tasks required to build your processes.

Mapping ITIL® Components — is an important segment because it is very difficult to know where to start and how to progress. We will discuss how to map processes to supporting functionality, using the Tivoli Foundation Service Manager solution as a bases.

ITIL® Templates — is where we will discuss the creation of different template views of ITIL® to help you to design your version of ITIL®. You will be encouraged to produce your own template, based on best practices already available in Tivoli Foundation Service Manager, to understand how to select your components.

Component Maturity — once you have selected your components the next stage is to start making preparations for implementation. One of the first steps is to identify the desired maturity level for your components.

Component Priorities — once we have our maturity levels established we will discuss how to prioritise the order in which to implement the processes and the tools needed to support them.

Gap Analysis — if we have performed all of the previous activities we are now ready to perform Gap Analysis on components that already exist, e.g. if you already have Incident Management you would need to assess the current maturity of your Incident Management and compare this with the target maturity level and the difference represents the Gap which is the work that you would need to perform to successfully implement Incident Management.

Master Action Plan — finally we will tie everything together with a Master Action Plan to quantify the lessons learnt here and also to ensure that you will be able to implement your own personalized version of ITIL®, using the Tivoli tools discussed in the workshop.

In today’s fast paced business environment, a streamlined IT support desk is vital. Tivoli Foundations Service Manager software from IBM helps your organisation deliver automated
service desk capabilities to identify and respond to issues more efficiently.

Benefits:
• Streamline and improve your service support operations, getting people back to work quickly.
• Reduce operational costs and improve ease of maintenance.
• Manage risk by providing integrated disaster recovery and availability management.

Why MACS?
MACS has a broad experience of implementing solutions for Maintenance Management, Asset Management and IT Service Management, working closely with industry leaders like IBM, we provide
consultancy services in order to achieve satisfaction for all of our clients. We strive to share our knowledge and experience with our customers. Our recent involvement at the Service Desk and IT Show held on the 27th/28thApril 2010, allowed us to successfully share some
of our knowledge with the attendees.

Webinars and Workshop
If you’d like to find out how to get the most out of
your IBM Tivoli Foundation Service Manager software sign up for one of our Entry Level Webinars or Workshop

Webinars

Tue 11th May 2010 10 - 11am
Thu 27th May 2010 13.30 -14.30pm
Thu 3rd June 2010 10 -11am

Workshops 

Thu 17 June 2010, 13:00 - 17:30

Tue 29 June 2010, 13:00 - 17:30

Small and medium sized organisations are focused on running the business and do not have abundant resources to manage IT. As technology becomes increasingly more complex, problem resolution becomes more timeconsuming, skill requirements increase and costs to maintain quality services escalate. In the face of tighter budgets and fewer resources, prioritisation, responsiveness, and standardised well defined processes are the keys to the availability of business-critical IT services.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager is a service support management appliance,ndesigned for general business customers, that provides basic service desk capabilities through IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) V3.0 aligned service request, incident, and problem management processes. IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager installs and configures quickly to help reduce time to value.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager is the service desk solution designed and priced specifically for smaller and medium sized organisations. It encompasses a broad variety of features that enable a single point of contact to automate service request, incident and problem management. The offering includes pre-defined features that have been found key to growing needs of small and medium sized organisations. Equally important, it is easy to install, configure and deploy.

Attend our webinar: Webinar:Introduction to incident management with Tivoli Foundations Service Manager (free of charge)

Attend our workshop: Workshop: Essentials of running a Service Desk: 10 Steps to increase performance and client satisfaction while reducing costs & risk (free of charge)

IBM Pulse 2010 opened yesterday, 21st February, with an enormous buzz on the internet. IBM and the attendees make sure, through several social media channels that all who stay at home do not have to miss out on the most important subjects. It may not always be clear to everyone what Social Media add, but with events like IBM Pulse that attracts thousands of people, social media certainly proves its added value. 

The MACS team also attends IBM Pulse. We will keep you updated of what they found out at IBM Pulse and if you have a query just send an e-mail info@macs.eu .

Meanwhile we have listed the most important blogs, video, twitters, etc. to keep track of the news at IBM Pulse.

IBM Maximo Asset Management Blog

http://bit.ly/cSY3N9

IBM Pulse Community

http://bit.ly/9PUCO1

IBM Pulse Blog

http://bit.ly/9oVllF

IBM Pulse Conference Channel

http://bit.ly/d5QCAw

www.twazzup.com
Just fill in #maximo or #ibmpulse to see all the latest news on twitter

Twitter: 

www.twitter.com/macsbv
www.twitter.com/macs_eu

www.twitter.com/ibmpulse

www.twitter.com/maximomary

Picture: www.twitter.com/davebart - David Bartlett

IBM Maximo Scheduler in depth

The list below shows in more details what it has to offer:

• New Gantt Chart control
• drag and drop wo/tasks
• view resource requirements
• manage task dependencies
•  Perform Critical Path Method scheduling (CPM Scheduling)
• Deal with "What if" scenarios
• Work with date constraints in work orders
• Work with precedence constraints in workorders
• Schedule tasks

IBM Maximo Scheduler reduces workload:

Maximo users no longer have to schedule work or labour outside the Maximo environment. It does not require additional work to integrate, maintain or synchronise with a tool outside Maximo.

 Further information:

If you would you like to receive further information, please email info@macs.eu with your details to request an online brochure.

The application starts with resource capacity and/or shift plans that come from IBM Maximo and has the capacity to continually optimize the schedule throughout the day to ensure that all jobs and engineers are optimally matched, even with changing specific service demands during the day.

The video below shows how the adapter seamlessly integrates ClickSchedule with IBM Maximo Asset Management. It shows service requests and work orders being created in Maximo, with scheduling and re-scheduling data being passed from ClickSchedule to Maximo. It also shows appointments slots being offered to Maximo from Clickschedule through the MACS adapter.

MACS BVBA's new offices are located at: 

Museumstraat 8

2000 Antwerp

Telephone:  +32 (0)3 237 17 55

Email: info@macs.eu