Because of the new wave of COVID-19 cases exploding in India, a leading US-based enterprise AI operating company, with seven businesses and over 2,200 employees, found many of its India-based employees and their families badly impacted at the end of April 2021. SymphonyAI—like many companies with large India teams—stepped in to provide relief.
As part of SymphonyAI, the SymphonyAI Summit team wanted to contribute. But how? An IT service management and asset management solution set is typically narrowly used by IT. But many analysts champion a broader enterprise service management vision because service and asset management capabilities can provide broad benefits beyond IT. This is how SymphonyAI Summit is helping provide relief—by provisioning and tracking much needed healthcare equipment and assets for employees and their families.
Providing healthcare support to employees using IT service management software
Across India in April, shortages of hospital beds, ventilators, access to oxygen cylinders, and critical care impacted hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 patients. One of the most valuable pieces of equipment is an oxygen concentrator—a device that pulls and concentrates oxygen out of the air, to provide relief to COVID-19 patients having difficulty breathing. But concentrators are in short supply in India. Parent company SymphonyAI worked to import and deliver concentrators from global suppliers—along with vaccines and other critical care—to employees and their families suffering from COVID-19. However, handling requests and distribution of those oxygen concentrators was difficult because employees and families are spread across Indian cities, towns, and villages.
SymphonyAI Summit—with its ITSM and ITAM capabilities—stepped in to help. By ensuring the rapid delivery of supplies and tracking the concentrators as they moved from one location (and employee) to another, SymphonyAI Summit was able to help ensure easy and frictionless delivery, along with much-needed logistics visibility to the Symphony AI task force team.
IT Service Management / IT Asset Management-directed COVID assistance
To prioritize getting help to those who needed it most, SymphonyAI Summit used ITSM and ITAM workflows and a self-service portal to direct COVID resources from multiple vendors to employees and their families all over India. The SymphonyAI COVID-19 help desk uses SymphonyAI Summit modules like Incident Management, Service Request, and Asset Management to manage the oxygen concentrators–as non-IT assets. The team created three key digital workflows for the concentrators to ensure maximized use and benefits:
- Service provision – from employee request to the delivery of the oxygen concentrator
- Service extension – so an employee can extend oxygen concentrator use beyond the standard time period
- Service decommission – to facilitate collecting the oxygen concentrator from one employee to send to another in need
Service provisioning oxygen concentrators—a non-IT asset
The workflow diagram below shows how an employee can request an oxygen concentrator via the self-service portal. The request is automatically routed to the HR team for approval, and the logistics team can then work to supply the oxygen concentrator.
Service extension and service decommission
The task force used a start-to-finish management workflow for the oxygen concentrators. The workflow diagram below shows how an employee is automatically alerted after a predefined period that their oxygen concentrator is due for return. The employee can request to extend use of the device – via the service extension process – or simply allow automatic collection. The oxygen concentrator can then be redistributed to another employee using the service provision process.
The Impact of utilizing IT service management amid a crisis
The SymphonyAI Summit COVID solution has helped employees and their families during a critical time, ensuring:
- Easy employee access to COVID policies and available help
- Rapid responses to critical employee needs and distribution, tracking, and monitoring of oxygen concentrators.
- A smooth experience for employees, so they can concentrate on their health and family, while keeping administration overhead to a minimum
- Critical visibility into operations and performance, with data-driven insights via native analytics and dashboarding capabilities
- Minimal administrative load for team members involved
The full spectrum of benefits the technology brought won’t be known until the pandemic is over. However, the ability to assist employees in a time of need is essential, and the true impact will be felt on a human level indefinitely.
If you would like to hear more about how SymphonyAI Summit provided pandemic-related employee assistance, or how SymphonyAI Summit can be used to help in the operations and outcomes within your organization, click here for demo.
Vijaya Shanker, CTO at SymphonyAI Summit
