Operating Level Agreement Management

Services for HR, F&A, IT, Telecommunications and other business processes often involve multiple service groups delivering segments of the total services required to support an entire business process. Gartner, a leading market research firm, highlights the importance of a disciplined approach to “multisourcing” in order to effectively manage successful results from the combination of services from multiple vendors.

When multiple SLAs are being managed, ServiceFlow provides organizations with the capabilities needed for integrating, reusing, and coordinating obligations across service contracts. Following are a few ServiceFlow capabilities that will yield significant benefits in this process:

revision controls enable multiple versions and revisions of the OLA and associated SLAs are easily managed and maintained with full audit trail capabilities over the lifecycle of the service relationships;
SLA/OLA database of previously developed SLAs and OLAs, ServiceFlow supports rapid development of new OLAs. The database can be quickly and efficiently utilized—for example, so records can be filtered based on customer, customer type, SLA type, OLA type, template name, etc.—organizations can realize significant time savings and improved SLAs individually and in combination as part of an OLA;
linked SLA/OLA templates enable organizations to realize tremendous benefits in efficiency. Once the SLA/OLA is created from a template, it may be separated from the base template, or it may retain all or selected links to the base template. Having such a “live” link allows users to make a change to a template and propagate it to hundreds or even thousands of individual SLAs and OLAs, and;
aggregated SLAs enable an OLA to be quickly developed based on a hierarchy of SLAs, with some SLAs starting from the component level, some at the contract level, and others that summarize multiple contracts. Gaining capabilities to group SLAs provides a critical high level perspective useful in managing OLAs. Grouping SLAs by geography, organizational structure, service hierarchy, and being able to aggregate across multiple levels, will prove invaluable to an effective multisourced SLA management deployment using ServiceFlow to automate the OLA/SLA processes.