After it acquired a number of companies in the 1990s, Zurich Life ended up with decentralized IT shops. As the business grew, it became difficult for the merged IT shops to monitor and manage the increased volume of IT services across the enterprise. In 1998, Zurich Life decided to consolidate its disparate help desks and chose Peregrine's ServiceCenter and its change and service level management capabilities to create a centralized service management solution.

“Peregrine's ServiceCenter enhances IT performance and customer satisfaction, allowing us to take our global business to the next level and provide the quality service for which Zurich Life is well known," says Mark Bradley, senior applications development analyst, Zurich Life. "For example, since working with Peregrine, our percentage of incidents closed on the first call has increased 138 percent, which frees up technicians to focus on more complex, unique IT problems and even proactively prevent them."

Zurich Life leveraged ServiceCenter's Active CMDB (configuration management database) to centralize IT asset and service management information, including incident, change and service level management data. With ServiceCenter's Active CMBD serving as the centralized service-level agreement (SLA) hub, Zurich Life has been able to provide IT management with consistently intelligent, up-to-date analysis and reporting on actual IT service performance against commitment.

Peregrine's ServiceCenter helped Zurich Life to improve IT productivity by more efficiently prioritizing IT services based on established SLAs. This functionality enables the IT team to focus on documenting and improving business processes, including automating and coordinating SLA processes, to manage the enterprise, instead of merely collecting and managing the data from SLAs. Zurich Life also uses Peregrine's Get-Services, an employee self-service application, to boost productivity by extending the service desk to its employees, enabling them to request service requests directly from any Web browser.

Through real-time reporting, a standard set of reports has been scheduled to automatically refresh every 15 minutes throughout the day, enabling Zurich Life to track such information as SLA performance by month and compare actual results against SLA commitments. Weekly meetings are held to report on SLAs. If SLAs are missed or appear to be at risk of not being met, IT management can drill down to pinpoint the exact events that caused the problem.

If a problem continues to arise, it is sent to a committee to perform a root-cause analysis in order to identify a long-term solution. Timely reports are given to executive management throughout the entire organization, thus leading to a higher degree of confidence in IT. In turn, this has freed the IT organization to re-focus on documenting and improving the processes to manage the enterprise, rather than collecting and managing SLA data.

"Today, IT must be aligned to support strategic business objectives and continually change as these goals evolve," says Craig Macdonald, Peregrine's vice president of product marketing. "Zurich Life is an excellent example of how sophisticated service management capabilities, such as those provided by ServiceCenter, enable IT to effectively define, predict and measure service availability and costs that map directly against the organization's business services."