PPL Sign up a New Performer to Tune their IT Services

PPL have chosen Richmond SupportDesk to tune up their IT Services to enhance the services they offer and ensure their IT provision is performing.

PPL was established by the record industry in 1934 as a music service company working on behalf of their performers and record company members.  They license sound recordings and music videos for use in broadcast, public performance and new media, collecting more than £115 million annually for distribution to their members.

Matt Linin, IT Service Delivery Manager at PPL runs the IT service department with his five colleagues. “The help desk which was in place when I arrived at PPL was just a to-do list, lacking the call tracking and historical data required for trend analysis reporting” stated Matt.

In March 2007, Matt started to review alternative service desk software by initially visiting the Service Desk Show, Olympia, London to conduct due diligence on the market. Richmond SupportDesk was short listed as Matt had used an earlier version of the software while at Sony Music. He also had experience of Remedy while at Turner Broadcasting. Matt’s findings were documented and the project presented to the company directors.

Matt stated, “It became evident early on in the project that SupportDesk was a good fit for PPL. ITIL procedures were important to us as we wanted to implement incident, problem and change management from day one and introduce others ITIL disciplines when appropriate for our business. Having used SupportDesk previously, this helped seal the deal for Richmond Systems as I was confident the service desk solution could take our IT service department forward." SupportDesk was selected including the Self Service Portal, enabling end users to interact with the desk via a web browser and PC Inventory, to retrieve information from hardware and software installed on their network.

Deployment took place in May 2007 following a week of consultancy led implementation and training.

“I did not need to sell SupportDesk internally to the team; they were really enthused and saw straight away how it could transform the IT service which we are able to offer”

Matt continued “In fact originally Richmond SupportDesk was intended just for the IT Service Team, but the benefits the software offered soon spread to the EBS Oracle team who manage and support our backend databases and the IT Solutions team who look after our iSeries server and facilities division bringing value across the company.”