Wealth management company Charles Stanley moves service management to the Cloud

Charles Stanley is one of the leading wealth management companies in the UK, dedicated to serving the private investor. It operates from 26 offices across the country, with 850 staff and a growing online business, Charles Stanley Direct.

 

The company’s ICT service team handles around 3,000 incident and service request tickets monthly. Incidents in Sunrise can concern mission-critical application issues, such as those for trading or related to support for the Charles Stanley Direct website and app, or support for desktop applications or devices.

 

An existing user of Sunrise with an on-premise installation, Charles Stanley saw an opportunity to improve processes and align to the ITIL framework, while also grasping the benefits of a SaaS-based platform. It therefore upgraded to Sunrise’s SaaS platform, hosted on IBM Cloud, in 2018, providing the combination of flexibility and security that the company was looking for.

 

By leveraging the functionality of Sunrise ITSM the Application Support team were able to dramatically reduce open incidents from 1,500 to under 100 in just three months. Charles Stanley adopted a pragmatic approach to the implementation of ITIL, and has been able to better understand and manage incident, problem and change management. Automation has assisted with email notifications around major incidents, further streamlining activities.

 

“When we looked at the market we quickly realised that Sunrise offered the pragmatic support for ITIL that we required, and that there was more benefit if we moved to SaaS, building on the database and functionality that we already had,” says Mike Jones, Head of ICT Service, Charles Stanley. “Thanks to Sunrise ITSM SaaS we are now aligned to ITIL and can push this approach through the entire business,” concludes Mike. “Not only have we improved how we handle our workload, but we can demonstrate our success through more detailed, business-focused reporting. ICT senior management and users of Sunrise ITSM can see the difference now we have upgraded to SaaS.”

 

As part of its future plans, Charles Stanley is now introducing a web self-service portal for users, backed by an extensive knowledge base. The aim is to reduce phone and email requests significantly by making solving a query or raising a ticket as easy as possible. It is also deploying Sunrise’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to get a better understanding of all its assets, enabling the team to improve visibility and save time when investigating incidents.

 

Geoff Rees, Director of Operations and Sales of Sunrise, comments: “To remain agile and flexible more and more organisations are moving to the Cloud for IT service management. Charles Stanley’s success in upgrading to Sunrise ITSM SaaS demonstrates that even businesses in regulated industries such as financial services can reap the benefits of the Cloud while ensuring that their data is protected at all times.”