The Gratz Bank Finds Success with ESM Approach to ITSM

June 8, 2021

Timely and reliable IT Service Management (ITSM) is critical for most organizations, but especially for those in the banking and financial industry. Systems need to run smoothly and securely, and any downtime or security issues can be very costly. To meet these challenges, IT staff need comprehensive visibility into technology operations, as well as sound change management processes.

At The Gratz Bank, they were initially outsourcing their IT services to a third-party provider. However, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mark Yerger said they weren’t getting the visibility they needed to plan effectively and meet the bank’s current and future technology needs, “We wanted to own these processes ourselves,” he said.

In order to take full ownership of their ITSM The Gratz Bank needed an affordable, highly flexible and customizable solution that would help IT staff provide reliable service while also accommodating future growth. That’s how they found TeamDynamix.

“TeamDynamix is flexible and has a very good price point,” Yerger said.

Project Manager Katie Hayes agrees, “It’s a very configurable tool.”

The Gratz Bank is using TeamDynamix to automate and streamline workflows for delivering IT service, managing projects and change requests, and tracking technology assets. Hayes has set up forms within the TeamDynamix platform for employees to request IT service tickets, projects, or changes. These forms collect the information needed to understand the nature of a request and then route it automatically to the appropriate team members for a response. Every action taken on a request is logged into the system so that everyone who’s authorized has full visibility into the status of each request.

Change control is vital for success, Yerger notes — especially in a banking environment. Introducing any change in hardware, software, or network configuration can create unforeseen problems, security holes, or outages. A well-designed change management strategy can reduce the chances of this occurring, and that’s what The Gratz Bank has created with the help of TeamDynamix.

By tracking the steps involved within TeamDynamix, Yerger, and others can see how the change might affect other systems and can easily troubleshoot if any problems should arise.

Expanding Across Departments

Although The Gratz Bank because with just ITSM, they’ve expanded the tools use outside of IT for a true Enterprise Service Management (ESM) experience.

For instance, the accounting department saw there was an opportunity to help them create a better process around paying vendor invoices and expense reimbursements. Hayes was able to set up an application for the accounting department, so employees could track the status of their reimbursement and to know if vendor checks had gone out on time. This has made a positive impact on the department.

By using TeamDynamix, The Gratz Bank has been able to automate and simplify complex, multiple-step processes throughout the bank, making it easy for the team to manage workflows. It has also improved visibility into IT operations. As a result, Yerger and his team can easily see how well they’re serving the needs of employees and customers, and where the most common technology-related problems are occurring.

“Because we now have a robust help desk application available, we have much more visibility and can plan for our IT needs more effectively,” Hayes says. “Without this tool, we couldn’t do that.”

Yerger agreed, “TeamDynamix has allowed us to take ownership of IT service management and create a foundation that we can expand on as our organization grows.”

To read more about ESM and TeamDynamix visit: www.teamdynamix.com/enterprise-service-management-esm/