Towergate Partnership Selects Hornbill For Centralised IT Desk

Towergate Partnership, an independently owned insurance intermediary, has selected Hornbill’s service management system to support over 3500 staff based in 100 different locations nationwide. Towergate uses Supportworks ITSM to provide a centralised service desk which is outsourced to Maxima, an IT shared service provider. This enables the support of Towergate employees who use desktop products and niche applications to service customers with over 200 insurance products. Towergate claims that using Supportworks ITSM has enabled them to improve incident and change management both for in-house applications and hosted third party IT systems.

Towergate selected Hornbill’s Supportworks ITSM for its ability to support ITIL processes and its easy integration with existing systems. According to Trevor Clements, Technical Project Manager at Towergate Partnership; "With Supportworks ITSM we now have improved management of our IT environment. Towergate Partnership has seen exponential growth by acquisition over the last few years and with this we have more staff and also many more niche trading platforms to support. As a large company we require enterprise-scale infrastructure and toolsets. Supportworks ITSM enables us to both support staff with system problems and plan any changes with careful resource allocation, minimising the impact upon users and the business."

The IT team uses Supportworks ITSM to ensure seamless workflow and integration between systems, including in-house applications and those hosted by third parties for specialist insurance - including marine, holiday homes and classic cars. Hardware and software changes are managed using Supportworks ITSM workflow processes to minimise system downtime. Users can call the service desk to log faults or queries either by phone or via the on-line staff portal.

Towergate IT Management also uses data from reports generated by Supportworks ITSM to proactively plan resources, undertake customer surveys and set departmental Service Level Agreements.

Fraser Fisher, Business Development Director, Maxima said; "Hornbill’s solution is very easy to use and provides us with the flexibility that we need to provide a customer-focused outsourced IT support operation. Supportworks is increasingly popular with our customers. Many are asking us to use Supportworks as the platform meets their needs to provide a centralised service desk."

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems commented, "Supportworks has been designed to provide flexible out-of-the-box IT Service Management functionality, based on a central platform enabling the provision of a seamless outsourced service and support model. Towergate Partnership are experiencing rapid growth and like many organisations, saw the need to adopt ITIL best practice alongside diversified or outsourced support models. Supportworks is flexible and is easily able to support these more complex, distributed support models to meet the challenges of providing support services to more people, more cost effectively."