Jawwy with ITOM

About Jawwy with ITOM

Jawwy is an innovative digital-first, pre-paid mobile telecommunications plan from stc (Saudi Telecom Company) – one of the region’s leading players in the sector. Jawwy customers can personalize, monitor, and manage their unique plans in real time using an intuitive mobile app. With simplified pricing and offers, Jawwy helps to minimize waste and maximize value for customers.

Jawwy was created as part of an evolutionary initiative driven by stc’s board and leadership, primarily aimed at a young demographic in the region. Its offering is entirely technology-led and Jawwy needed to ensure that its IT infrastructure could manage the influx of up to 6,000 requests each month. This is a combination of external customer support requests and internal service, incident and change requests. Apart from a streamlined service management strategy with end-to-end automated ticket management, the organization needed effective system monitoring with full visibility and reporting. Mr. Muhammad Selim Akhtar, SOC Manager, Technology Operations at Jawwy, explains further: “As a fast-growing organization with limited manpower we saw the importance of automation and integration. stc has an existing relationship with Micro Focus, but we evaluated the relevant solutions for us on their own merit and compared them with market alternatives. We felt that Micro Focus SMAX and a suite of Micro Focus monitoring solutions would fit our requirements and help us be more responsive to our business stakeholders.”

SMAX replaced a legacy ITSM solution which required a lot of manual intervention and checking different systems to prepare service status reports. Introducing SMAX incident, service request, change, release, knowledge, and problem management processes, along with the use of knowledge articles, quickly impacted the productivity of the service management team who are dealing with approximately 6,000 tickets per month.

With SMAX, reporting and dashboards are automated and real-time, support agents can see tickets pending and a 360° view provides insight into any bottlenecks. The team can analyze and address key issues much faster, so that they can be fixed before causing issues to customers. Mr. Khurram Shehzad, Senior Manager, Technology Operations at Jawwy comments: “Through our SMAX categorization we auto-assign most of our incoming support tickets to the relevant support team. This used to be a time-consuming manual task and as a result we have drastically reduced our issue resolution time. We also have clear insight into any ticket status. Having a centralized and consolidated SMAX environment has reduced the amount of time we spend managing and solving our service requests by approximately 50 percent. And without the need to monitor different tools, reporting manpower has been reduced by 20 percent. It used to take days to create specific reports, and now they are just a click away for our team.”

To drive productivity gains even further and for ease of access, Jawwy will next introduce virtual agent support, as well as the SMAX mobile app. The team is also excited about the potential to leverage SMAX’s asset management capabilities more fully and expand the service catalogue. Mr. Khurram Shehzad is pleased to share that “Jawwy’s objective in deploying SMAX to improve service levels and optimize productivity by centralizing and consolidating the environment has been met.”

Jawwy had a system monitoring solution in place for its server landscape, but it had limitations. Coupled with an Excel-based process it ensured a level of stability but was difficult to manage and resource-intensive. “We still had to monitor many systems separately and we could not get consolidated metrics on our overall performance, which is data we need to show to our business stakeholders,” says Ms. Navya Mandepudi, MF Tools Administrator, Technology Operations at Jawwy. “Having implemented Micro Focus Operations Bridge, Application Performance Management (APM), Business Process Monitor (BPM), and SiteScope we saw how this suite of monitoring solutions matches our agile environment much better. The solutions integrate seamlessly with each other and with SMAX. By installing an Operations Bridge agent on each of our servers we automatically gather performance metrics around CPU, RAM, and storage usage, highlighting spikes in performance. Any action items are pushed to SMAX, auto-assigned, and the owner receives an SMS or email alert to manage the item.”

All monitoring is managed from a central interface, eliminating the need to monitor separate systems. Centralized policies and threshold standards have been introduced to reduce a multitude of alerts and prevent raising multiple tickets against the same issue. The integrated solutions receive data from a variety of sources which is collated and correlated to identify any discrepancies. In a complete 360° view all monitoring requirements are fulfilled with comprehensive performance metrics to satisfy business stakeholders. Mr. Muhammad Selim Akhtar can clearly see the value of the optimized monitoring environment: “Through the use of Micro Focus monitoring solutions we have created a more stable environment, while reducing our reporting manpower efforts by an estimated 20 percent.”

The Jawwy team appreciates Micro Focus support. “Our Premium support contract provides us with Technical Account Managers for the SMAX and system monitoring infrastructure,” comments Mr. Sreemanth Chekka, Operations Manager, Technology Operation, Jawwy. “These valued contacts help us and can escalate or prioritize any issues we might have. They are always there for us and have really cemented the partnership with Micro Focus.”

Mr. Ali Al Harbi, VP, Technology Operations at Jawwy comments: “Our ongoing digital transformation sees us adding many servers to our infrastructure in the coming months. With Micro Focus solutions supporting our service management and monitoring requirements, we feel prepared to scale up and meet new business challenges.”

Mr. Hany Abou Shady, Chief Technology Officer at Jawwy concludes: “Our digital-first, app-based approach represents real experience innovation in our industry. Micro Focus solutions help us sharpen our competitive edge of operation excellence, thus boosting our customer satisfaction.”