Interserve Plc

Interserve is based in the UK and is a FTSE 250 company. The business that was ultimately to become Interserve was formed in 1884 as the London and Tilbury Lighterage Company Limited. Tilbury expanded into construction and civil engineering from the 1950s onwards, acquiring businesses including RM Douglas, How Group and Bandt. It changed to Interserve in 2001 to focus on building, services and maintenance, achieving consistent organic growth through the years. It has revenues of £1.8 billion and a workforce of 50,000 people worldwide today. Challenge Interserve provides 'lifecycle' management for its clients' buildings and infrastructure, from construction, maintenance and facilities management. Facilities management is a broad discipline which encompasses front of house duties such as managing the reception, catering and cleaning through to delivering IT services and security. Interserve has an IT team with 80 staff including project managers, business analysts and support teams. It has numerous back office systems to help with the day-to-day running of its clients' facilities operations. These systems are used across the Interserve client property portfolio, which includes many Government and Ministry of Defence (MoD) buildings. One of these back office systems is IBM Maximo, an Enterprise Asset Management system. Front of house staff working in its clients' buildings use facilities management software called PeopleCube, which allows employees to book meeting rooms and order refreshments. The two systems, Maximo and PeopleCube were not integrated together which resulted in front of house staff who wanted to book refreshments for a meeting having to input the details onto both systems, as PeopleCube could not raise the physical order - this came via Maximo. On a separate issue, for maintenance requests, Interserve wanted further integration of its Maximo back office system to allow its building maintenance staff to receive repair requests from Maximo via wireless, hand held personal digital assistant units (PDAs) through a system managed by BT Mobile to improve efficiency, and to capture real-time data in terms of the progress of a particular repair request. The integration of these systems was crucial to improving efficiency. Data security was a particular concern as the systems are used in some highly sensitive environments such as the MoD, with special restrictions placed on the use and storage of data that relates to thousands of MoD personnel. Any integration would have to be suitable for handling information officially classed as restricted data. This meant that the data held in any two systems needed to be kept separate at all times and no data files could be made or kept during the processing of data between the systems. Solution Chris Hembrow works as a Solutions Architect for Interserve and was responsible for the integration project. He initially engaged a team of external programmers to develop a bespoke integration system.  The programmers spent months writing new code, racking up significant costs. And, if implemented, the new system would have involved major prohibitive changes to the existing systems. Chris decided it was clear that the programmers could not solve the significant issues facing their proposed system and the project was scrapped. Chris was back to square one - next he invited a team of integrators who promoted Microsoft BizTalk, Microsoft's integration and connectivity server solution to allow Maximo to communicate with PeopleCube and the BT Mobile system. BizTalk was more promising in terms of the integration, but could not meet the strict data security criteria of complete database separation set by the MoD as BizTalk stores the data it needs in its own SQL database. Costs for BizTalk were also highly prohibitive requiring a complex arrangement of software licences. As Chris removed BizTalk from the solutions list, he then approached Datadialogs, a company he had used when he worked for a previous company. He understood the benefits of Eden, the company's lean-IT platform. Eden enabled service orientated architecture (SOA) so that systems can be constructed from discreet components which participate together through a common communications method while remaining completely independent of each other. Eden's ability to integrate, but also keep systems independent, addressed one of the key requirements for the Maximo integration. It met the strict MoD data security requirements as Eden does all processing 'in memory' rather than storing data in shared files. Chris invited Datadialogs to present the Eden solution and it soon became clear to Chris that this was a flexible tool which would facilitate simple integration between Interserve's back and front office systems. Datadialogs produced a proof of concept which was accepted, and the Eden team got to work. Rather than the months of programming from the initial bespoke software solution, it took just ten working days for the Eden team to complete the whole integration. "The Eden team are impressive, they know their subject inside out and are experienced professionals. They have real passion for what they do, give you the right answers to any questions and they just don't have the stuffiness of working with the big companies," commented Chris Hembrow. Result Eden has achieved all the objectives that Chris needed to achieve. For Interserve's front of house employees, they can now use PeopleCube to order refreshments for meeting rooms, with the order going automatically through to Maximo ready for despatch. With regards to the maintenance engineers, Eden checks for repair requests on Maximo and sends them to the engineer's PDA using the BT Mobile system.  The engineer can then report on the status of the request and send it back to Maximo. Learning from the whole project experience, Chris praises Eden for reducing the cost of integration to deliver tangible business benefits. "Eden is such a robust solution. The reliability is exceptional to the extent that you never really notice it is there. On the security aspect for our MoD and Government clients, Eden solves the huge problem of integrating systems together without sharing data onto a common file. As far as I know, Eden is the only product to be able to pass the test of integrating systems using restricted data," Chris commented. With Eden offering such a flexible integration tool, Chris is constantly thinking of new ways to use it. He has already invited the Eden team back to integrate Maximo with Interserve's finance system to automatically take invoice and purchase order data from Maximo and feed it back to the Finance department. For the maintenance engineers system, Eden now uses Maximo to produce a user satisfaction survey which Eden sends via email. All results are then recorded and reported back. "I'm aware that as a business we are not really taxing Eden with the integration work we are doing - which is amazing considering the trouble we had with the other solutions we investigated. There are so many opportunities for Eden to bring systems together to talk to each other. The Eden programming environment is very agile, making it very simple for programmers to achieve sophisticated levels of integration. I will now keep inviting Datadialogs back to pick off fresh integration challenges." Interserve Plc Intersection House 110 Birmingham Road West Bromwich W. Midlands B70 6RP Reference www.interserve.com

Company Interserve Plc Website www.interserve.com Industry Construction, Facilities Management, Services Solution Eden Business Edition Results: 1. Fully integrated Maximo with Interserve's finance system 2. Mobile workforce automation 3. Achieved IL 2 and IL 3 for MoD and Government client "There are so many opportunities for Eden to bring systems together to talk to each other. The Eden programming environment is very agile, making it very simple for programmers to achieve sophisticated levels of integration."