ITSM that helps PICA Group scale

PICA Group is not just a property services company with 200,000 multi-unit properties in its portfolio—it's also very acquisitive, adding at least one business a year to expand its service offerings. But scale was a problem for PICA’s legacy IT system, BMC Software, which strained under the load of an ever-expanding number of users and the complexities of integrating new holdings’ IT systems. Integration, migration, and standardization of IT service and incident management were becoming a bottleneck, impacting overall system reliability and stability. 

By replacing BMC with Freshservice, PICA improved its IT service management (ITSM) by more easily consolidating IT systems from its acquisitions and standardizing ITSM across its growing organization. Now, PICA can better monitor and track issues and create a cohesive IT experience for agents and employees. Average resolution time improved by 66.3%, and SLA adherence increased to 93.2%.

The company

Prudential Investment Company of Australia (PICA) is a leading property services company managing over 200,000 property lots. A joint venture between Ireland’s Fexco and Japan’s Nippon Kanzai, PICA offers comprehensive property management and related services. With a network of 28 branches and 600 staff, the company serves 200,000 residential, commercial, resort, and mixed-use properties. 

The challenge

To grow its property management business, PICA Group set its sights on expanding the services it could offer to its clients—property owners—by acquiring companies and folding their businesses into the organization. To support the additional headcount and increasing complexities of the business, PICA relied on its legacy ITSM tool, BMC. However, this on-premise solution lacked customization capabilities and wasn’t user-friendly, hindering integration, migration, and standardization efforts.

Without a more flexible and scalable tool, the IT team struggled to serve existing employees, let alone their new colleagues. They lacked visibility into IT performance and the root causes of recurring issues, leaving agents repeating tasks within BMC’s complex interface, hampering their productivity. This led to longer incident resolution times and a pile-on of tickets. 

PICA sought a solution that would improve communication with internal members and cross-functional teams, be easy to use, and have self-service and release management capabilities to ensure high user adoption.

The solution

After evaluating different ITSM products, including Jira and Zendesk, the IT team at PICA Group decided on Freshservice. The team considered Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) compliance, modern user interface, ease of use, and scalability, among other features, selecting Freshservice for its ease of implementation, usability, value for money, and support.

“The support and response have been great,” says Neal Krempin, head of IT. “The product specialists go above and beyond and respond to your tickets or queries within two to three hours.” 

By standardizing on one tool, PICA’s ITSM began to operate with greater ease and efficiency, using Freshservice to segment tickets into different categories and conduct impact and root-cause analysis. Workflow Automator helps the IT team curate automated responses according to different stages of the ticket management process, reducing follow-up calls from 100 to 30 per day. 

Agents are more engaged thanks to the platform’s gamification and arcade features, fostering a friendly competitive spirit. Every resolved incident is a level-up on the leaderboard, and each satisfied customer is a bonus point. The user-friendly Freshservice mobile app has significantly improved the team's ability to manage a high volume of tickets efficiently. They can manage IT changes and resolve tickets anytime, anywhere, and speed up approvals on the go. “The internal team loves using Freshservice,” says Krempin.

Through the implementation of Freshservice, PICA Group has successfully transformed its IT service management from a reactive to a proactive approach, creating more engaged agents in the process.

Impact

With Freshservice, built on Neo Platform and powered by AWS, PICA gained global visibility into IT service and assets, enabling process improvements and further standardization among its subsidiaries. Average resolution time improved by 66.3%, hitting a 93.2% SLA adherence. 

PICA plans to implement several Freshservice modules more extensively, including configuration management database (CMDB) and change, asset, release, and contract management. The company will also be rolling out Freshservice for the employee onboarding process. 

With Freshservice, PICA significantly improved IT service management, paving the way for further growth and innovation.