How Embark Group gained greater control over their service with HaloITSM

In a sentence or two, tell us what your company does.

Embark Group is a fast growing, diversified, financial services business and one of the largest retirement solutions providers in the UK. We operate successfully in both the advised and institutional areas of the retirement market through our leading range of pension, wrap platform, multi-asset funds, research and consultancy services. In January 2022, Embark Group became part of the Lloyds Banking Group.

Before you found HaloITSM, what problems were you facing?

There were several issues we faced with our previous tool. One challenge was a physical limit on the number of values that could be held in custom fields (e.g. Incident Categories). Similarly, the number of assets that could be recorded was subject to strict limits. The only way to overcome these issues would have come at a significant cost to the business. Configuration options on the product were limited and so the extra expenses could not be justified. An all-inclusive solution, HaloITSM, made more sense to us.

“HaloITSM offers us the degree of flexibility and functionality that we need to align to our business as it moves forward at a cost that makes it real “value for money”

Richard Aylin, Service and Support Management Analyst

Which features have you been using and why?

• Tickets. The main reason for using an SDMT.  Central point to log tickets and to be able to spread tickets across different IT “teams”. We use the various configuration options to create our own workflows specific ticket types.  This leads to a degree of flexibility allowing us to automate the creation of additional tickets, subject to pre-defined criteria.
• Asset Management. We use Halo as our main Asset Register and take advantage of the SCCM integration which enables us to keep up to date with laptops and their current users, all in one centralised location.
• Users. We use the Azure Active Directory integration to update our list of users and to show when users have left. We prefer to have users already in the system before they raise a ticket.
• Knowledge Base. This is particularly useful for new IT technicians or where a particular issue has not been reported recently. It is very helpful being able to search for relevant articles when in a ticket (as well as the built-in “suggestion” feature).
• Reporting. We have a range of standard reports that are issued via the built-in scheduled email functionality to various users around the organisation. The SQL queries are shown within Halo and this helps us to create new, bespoke queries within the application.
• Purchase Orders. We use this to track our own IT purchases – these details are stored in custom fields within our Asset Register.

What are some of the ways HaloITSM has helped you?

We started using HaloITSM a few months before the start of the coronavirus pandemic as well as in the middle of some significant M&A activities. The way we worked had to adapt very quickly to support remote working and was (and has been since) a completely different environment to that pre-2020. HaloITSM offered us the flexibility and scalability to ensure that we were able to constantly adapt to the changing situation and keep ourselves as agile as we needed to be. I do not believe that this would have been as easy to do with the tools we had used previously.

Would you recommend HaloITSM and why?

Yes we would, so much so that we have already referred the product to other organisations. Put simply, it offers us the degree of flexibility and functionality that we need to align to our business as it moves forward at a cost that makes it real “value for money”.

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