Syngenta initially developed its Shopping-based portal in an effort to reduce the number of software requests being handled by its central administration team. “Our teams were handling on average around 3,700 requests a month,” says Brooks Truitt, Syngenta Global Service Delivery Manager. “We calculated that each request was costing us an average of $40 saved per request, so now we are saving approximately $148,000 per month, which comes to $1,776,000 per year.”
“By leveraging Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) in conjunction with 1E’s Shopping, we have greatly streamlined our software distribution management and are saving $1,776,000 per year,” comments Truitt. “Where sign-off is necessary, Shopping automatically generates approval requests to Site Service Managers or department heads. Before we implemented Shopping, users had to make direct requests to the helpdesk team, who would arrange to have the software approved and then installed. It was effectively a manual process.”
Syngenta only has a handful of globally-managed applications. Most software is specific to the needs of the divisions, teams or locations using it, but Site Service Managers looking after their sites still had to make requests to the central IT team to make new applications available to their users via Shopping.
“For example, our Seeds division uses different applications to those used in our Crop Protection division,” says Truitt, “Each service manager had to send a request to the central IT team every time they wanted to make a new software available to users.”
“As those requests were being actioned centrally, it could mean a two- or three-day delay before it was made available for users to download locally. It was incredibly frustrating for all.” By allowing the service managers to decide for themselves which applications would be published to their users, Syngenta has enabled faster and better decision making, making the business more agile, and helped users by making it easier for them to request the software. “We’ve had a lot of very positive feedback from the site service managers and from users since the change,” adds Truitt.
