Great River Energy

Great River Energy is a not-for-profit electric cooperative that generates and transmits wholesale electricity to 28 distribution cooperatives in Minnesota and Wisconsin. These members distribute electricity to more than 1.7 million people. The company has more than 2,500 megawatts of generation and 4,500 miles of transmission lines and has been a long time user of IBM® Maximo® Asset Management software to manage its nearly 110,000 enterprise assets.

The need
In 2004, the company’s IT Support Services team sought to gain better control over its IT assets. Asset information on desktops, laptops, networking, and appliance devices was stored in a Microsoft Access database and staff found it difficult to track service requests and confirm proper software licensing. As the team evaluated available options, it realized that to improve service response and reduce costs it needed an integrated approach that could standardize incident, service request and change management processes across three major organizations: operations, transmission and generation, and the IT help desk. “We made a choice at that time: We could have one system that does asset management, and another system that does the rest, and we could spend our time integrating these systems and passing data back and forth, or we could find one solution that does it all,” says Melanie Eisenbraun, manager, IT Support Services, Great River Energy. “We chose one solution that does all.”

The solution
Using an Integrated Service Management solution based on IBM® Tivoli Service Request Manager® software, Great River Energy has a single window to monitor, manage and report on incidents, service requests, internal work requests, and change requests. IBM Tivoli® Asset Management for IT and IBM Maximo® Asset Management software provide visibility into the company’s more than 110,000 enterprise and IT assets spread across Minnesota.

“Our transmission and generation division has used IBM Maximo extensively for 15 years to manage enterprise assets, but many of the devices that they have are becoming more IT in nature,” says Jade Warren, senior IT support analyst, Great River Energy. “The seamless integration between the IT and the asset management functionality made IBM Tivoli software the right choice for us.”

With Tivoli Service Request Manager, the IT Support Services team can easily process, track and prioritize service requests and incidents based on impact to the business. More than 13,000 tickets are created annually. Ticket templates allow work order fields to be pre-populated with information already entered into the service request and provide predefined activities to help support staff more quickly resolve known problems. Any major incident is highlighted on the bottom of the screen so analysts can quickly view who the project owner is, when the incident was registered, when it was escalated and the status. In cases where a request is escalated to another department, the software enables the team to continue to track progress and provide users with a single point of contact within IT.

“Both our facilities and system operations groups utilize our same ticketing process—same application, same workflow—and it makes it really easy to maintain, train and track information,” says Warren. “You create one screen, you maintain one screen, you document one screen, you train on one screen. Our former service management tool made the process very inefficient and was not conducive to good reporting.”

The benefit

• Helps IT Support Services team close nearly 40 percent of tickets (incidents and service requests) within two hours and complete 85 percent without escalation
• Increases efficiency to enable team to improve service delivery while lowering costs
• Enables more efficient use of existing assets and reduces unnecessary purchases through an enterprise-wide view of all assets
• Enables existing team to support more work