3 Things that Matter to Cash America: How Mobility and Integrations - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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3 Things that Matter to Cash America: How Mobility and Integrations have made their business more reliable

Matt Ivy Infrastructure Analyst, Cash America

CLIENT CASE STUDY – CASH AMERICA

xMatters (alarmpoint) client training forum

October 5 – 6, 2010, Manhattan

2 WHAT MATTERS TO CASH AMERICA

• 1. Combining existing products and services

with a communication solution that allows them to react faster

• 2. Accessing critical systems when an issue

arises to resolve the situation faster

• 3. Speeding up the amount of time it takes to

react to an incident before it impacts the business

3 A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON CASH AMERICA

• Cash provides specialty financial services to

individuals in the United States and Mexico with

• ver 1,000 locations
• Largest pawn loan and pay day loan provider in the

world

• Based in Fort Worth, TX
• 17.5% growth year over year
• 50 IT staff
• Supporting 200 systems to keep the business up and

running

4 EXAMPLES SITUATIONS

• Scenario #1: If a machine went down or stalled
• vernight, it would not get worked on until morning

– Keeping the stores from processing loans – Resulting in lost revenue

• Scenario #2: Many systems sent many alerts to

multiple people whether they supported the app or not

– Slowed productivity and resolution – Produced white noise, personnel eventually ignored alerts

• Scenario #3: Notifications had to be sent out by a

person when a situation would arise and finding the right person took time

– Slowing resolution time – Adding human error and additional resources and costs to the process

5 CHALLENGES - WHY WE NEEDED A RELEVANCE ENGINE

• Improve system reliability to keep up with growth

– Adding multiple monitoring systems and applications – Each system has a different method of alert delivery – Each system only sends email

• Needed to improve mean time to repair

– Issue went unresolved at night – Mornings were stressful and full of lost revenue

• A down system is money lost

– Over 1000 stores rely on corporate systems to approve loans

6 IT ARCHITECTURE LANDSCAPE – A QUICK LOOK UNDER THE COVER

7 WHY WE CHOSE THE XMATTERS (ALARMPOINT) ENGINE

Integrations

• xMatters (alarmpoint) engine was the most

versatile for integrations

– Quest Foglight – enterprise application monitoring – SolarWinds – network management – Microsoft SCOM – operations manager

• Only took 17 days to integrate into existing

products

8 WHY WE CHOSE THE XMATTERS (ALARMPOINT) ENGINE

Mobility

• xMatters mobile access allows IT staff to access

critical systems from any mobile device

• In the future, we will use mobile access to:

– Update tickets – Approve changes – Resolve incidents

• IT staff is available at any time, from any place so

events are resolved faster and action can be taken while away from the console

9 WHY WE CHOSE THE XMATTERS (ALARMPOINT) ENGINE

Speeding up the resolution process

• Service impact no longer than necessary

– The right person was informed quickly and efficiently – Reduced MTTR by 77%

• Automation is key

– No more phone calls or physically sending emails – Personnel is notified quickly before business impact

10 HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED

Now have:

– Reportability: metrics on who gets notified and how long it takes to resolve the incident – Accountability: people are available when they say they are, and working quickly to resolve events – Uniformity: all messages look the same regardless of what system they come from – Flexibility: notifications are delivered through emails, SMS, BES, phone calls – however we want

11 BEFORE XMATTERS

• Before xMatters

– Monitoring system would notify everyone in an email group causing confusion about who was working an issue – If email was received at night the problem was left until morning – Average MTTR was 90 minutes Before xMatters After xMatters Time to notify staff of event Not Guaranteed Immediately Time from alert to accepting ticket 5 to 480 minutes 5 minutes MTTR (reduced by 77%) 90 minutes 20 minutes

Faster response times  Faster resolution  Protected revenue

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