Case Study
Boral
- 108
- Initial services
- 3
- Month deployment
- 55+%
- Increase in portal use
Quick Wins for IT
- 50% reduction in number of generic tickets raised, saving time at the Service Desk
- Reduced downtime by increasing the speed of responding to requests
- Employees able to resolve issues through self-service
- Increased IT portal usage by 55%
The Challenge
Boral IT staff regularly endured the frustration experienced by end users attempting to utilise their self-service portal, with poor search functionality, difficulty in locating service catalogue items and an all-around lack of user friendly features that made it hard to interact with the portal in an efficient manner.
Boral sought a service desk that would provide IT Service Management capability as well as an improved end user portal for their staff. A key requirement was to ensure that the tool could be deployed in a timely manner with a focus on configuration over customisation.
The new deployment was part of an overall transformation of the end user environment, including transition to a new service desk provider, enabling omni channel support to its 5000 employees as well introducing “tech bar” style support services at key support hub sites distributed across Australia.
The Solution
Boral turned to Cherwell Software, and with the assistance of Service Dynamics as its implementation partner began working on a pilot solution. The scope included over 100 catalogue items and associated workflow approvals, ability for end users to view the status of their requests, and the necessary approval hierarchy to meet internal procurement and purchasing policies. The team had approximately three months to build and deploy the solution including training its IT staff to use the new ITSM functions within Cherwell.
Incident management and request fulfillment were successfully implemented and deployed within the three months supporting over 100 service requests of varying complexity such as integrating with procurement and financial systems. This was complemented by knowledge management and configuration management. For most Boral business users, the most visible change was the new Boral Assist Portal.

The Results
Immediately, the new Boral Assist Portal improved the business user experience resulting in a greater than 20% increase in employee-submitted requests through the self-service portal within the first three months alone. End-user feedback included that the new system was not only easier to use, but that it also increased end-user confidence in IT by being able to track the status of their service requests.
With a single system of record, service management data quality also improved. Dashboards and reports provided better visibility to management and increased accountability within the service desk team. This included providing insight into common questions such as what happened yesterday or last night. The improved insight also facilitated conversations within the Boral team on how to improve service delivery and support that was not previously possible.
The Future
Boral is in the process of implementing Cherwell Asset Management and expects to obtain significant improvements in their software license utilisation, compliance tracking, and a reduction in associated costs. Overall IT asset management (ITAM) complements the improved service request workflows and capabilities provided by the new Boral Assist Portal.
Boral is also introducing Problem and Change Management processes within Cherwell Service Management.
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