{"id":160424,"date":"2017-11-21T14:24:39","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T13:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.devoteam.com\/success-story\/the-midcounties-co-operative-brings-it-closer-to-users-through-self-service\/"},"modified":"2025-08-12T15:59:48","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T13:59:48","slug":"the-midcounties-co-operative-brings-it-closer-to-users-through-self-service","status":"publish","type":"success-story","link":"https:\/\/devoteam.info\/uk\/success-story\/the-midcounties-co-operative-brings-it-closer-to-users-through-self-service\/","title":{"rendered":"The Midcounties Co-operative brings IT closer to users through self-service"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Devoteam helped Midcounties transform its legacy issue-tracking system and change processes for its large user community by introducing ServiceNow and a self-service portal. They also replaced the service desk with resolver groups to maximise corporate productivity and achieve a 70% improvement in SLA compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Snapshot<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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1<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UK’s largest independent co-operative needed to modernise its IT service management to support 9,000 colleagues across a diverse portfolio of businesses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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2<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its legacy service desk was overwhelmed, leading to poor service levels and causing employees to bypass the proper IT support channels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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3<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The co-operative partnered with Devoteam to implement a ServiceNow self-service portal, replacing the service desk with a direct-to-resolver group model.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

About the Client<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Midcounties Co-operative is a consumer co-operative owned and controlled by its members, helping them source quality goods and services at fair prices. The largest independent co-operative in the UK, Midcounties operates 547 sites across a range of businesses, including those in the food, travel, health care, funeral, child care, energy, post office, and employee flexible benefits services industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Main challenges<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

IT was losing its customers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With such a large and diverse volume of businesses, Midcounties\u2019 IT team must support 330 different information systems. A service desk staffed by seven full-time employees was challenged to provide consistent service to its 9,000 colleagues. The service desk was overloaded with phone calls and emails, causing a backlog of hundreds of support tickets. A limited issue tracking system provided little visibility and did not distinguish between incidents and service requests, making it difficult to prioritise and resolve issues quickly. Only about half of the requests received met IT\u2019s SLA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cOur businesses have changed and grown over time, and it was increasingly difficult to manage IT services end to end,\u201d says Paul Mills, head of the portfolio office at Midcounties Co-operative. \u201cAs a result, many employees stopped going through the proper IT channels. There was a lot of rogue IT. We had to give them a better option and become easier to do business with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Midcounties was also upgrading to a new ERP system and shifting to thin-client computing that would touch nearly every employee. But the transition was too risky to undertake with the co-operative\u2019s overwhelmed service desk and limited change management processes. Mills adds: \u201cTo minimise the impact on our IT team and organisational productivity, we needed a better solution for service management. Our goal was to enable users to log and track requests through an easy-to-use portal rather than call the service desk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did we solve?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A strong foundation for service management<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having evaluated ServiceNow, Hornbill, LANDESK, and ASSYST, Midcounties selected ServiceNow for its ease of use, flexibility, fast deployment, no infrastructure to maintain, and the impact it would have on their business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The co-operative appointed Devoteam, a major ServiceNow partner across Europe, to deploy ServiceNow IT Service Management. Devoteam conducted several workshops on incident, problem, and change management, remote management, and SLAs, validating the fit of the client\u2019s processes to ServiceNow\u2019s out-of-the-box functionality. As the leader of the work streams, Devoteam was able to use best practices to minimise changes to the ServiceNow application.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe Devoteam team was absolutely fantastic, and they helped us customise the system to fit very specific requirements for our many different lines of business,\u201d says Mills.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWith their help, we had ServiceNow integrated with our Microsoft Active Directory and the self-service portal ready to use in just 55 days.\u201d Midcounties showed its appreciation of Devoteam\u2019s work by naming the ServiceNow help feature after the Devoteam consultant that created it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acceptance of the self-service portal in Midcounties increased dramatically from 6% the week they launched the portal to 88% two months later. This meant Midcounties could phase out the service desk entirely and route tickets directly to the resolver groups for each business unit, greatly reducing resolution time. There are no more bottlenecks in IT created by tickets being generated for every task. The fast new personalised self-service facility has improved employee satisfaction and restored confidence in IT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Main benefits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The new service management solution delivered a 70% improvement in SLA compliance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The Midcountries self-service portal increased user adoption from 6% to 88% within two months.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The implementation enabled the complete replacement of the service desk with direct resolver groups.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Maximising value and cost savings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aaron Clayton, Deputy CIO at Midcounties, said: \u201cWe have found Devoteam\u2019s approach, expertise and practical experience to be especially useful. Their knowledge of service management environments has saved us so much time and effort and helped us to avoid the common pitfalls of implementing a whole new service platform.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Improved service management has seen many positive changes throughout Midcounties\u2019 businesses:<\/p>\n\n\n\n