About Solent NHS Trust

Solent NHS Trust offers a growing range of community and mental health services across Southampton, Portsmouth, and parts of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

The Challenge

Solution 

The first areas of the contact went live in December 2022, after several months of close collaboration with Solent's own team to ensure a smooth transition, following the switch-off of the incumbent supplier's services in March of that year. This required a considerable amount of hands-on support, including out of hours, to ensure more than 4,000 staff were able to retain access to the Citrix VPN, avoiding any disruption to day-to-day operations.

As part of a wider hardware refresh, more than 4,000 new laptops were provisioned over the course of ten weeks, replacing much of the legacy technology that was still in use, including across several remote sites. An end user survey was conducted to help maximise adoption and ensure any opportunities for improvement could be identified and acted upon. With more than 2,000 responses, this provided Exponential-e with a rich pool of actionable data with which to design and optimise the new support operation.

Critical to the success of the new support function was the design and implementation of a robust IT Service Management platform, powered by ServiceNow®. By creating a domain separated instance within Exponential-e's managed service offering, Solent would not need to design and deploy the new ITSM platform from scratch, ensuring it would be ready to use on designated go-live date. At the same time, moving the function from CAPEX to OPEX allowed for greater cost control, while minimising the initial expenditure.

In order to meet Solent's specific requirements for their ticketing system, this solution was based on the Exponential-e's defined ITIL-aligned standards and service workflows, with an agreed scope for further customisation and hands-on support from Exponential-e's technical specialists included in the contract. The resulting platform combining the advantages of a proven, well-established solution with the highest levels of control and flexibility in terms of the final implementation and its ongoing development.

Following a successful transition to the new end user support function and the rollout of the ITSM platform, Exponential-e have continued to develop the operation in direct response to Solent's evolving requirements, ensuring business-critical issues can be resolved as quickly as possible. This has included recruiting extra service desk personnel, and implementing out-of-hours cover, while expanding the team's roaming tech hub to ensure all sites are properly supported. Time-to-resolution has been set out in robust SLAs and KPIs, with specific processes and escalations in place to manage high-impact events, and dedicated response engineers in place.

To optimise the efficiency and accessibility of service desk agents, Exponential-e designed and implemented an appointment-based system, ensuring staff who required hands-on IT support could access it as quickly as possible. This has since helped reduced walk-ins for IT-related issues from around 600 per month to less than 30.

The months of work put into establishing this foundation has since allowed Solent and Exponential-e to establish a culture of ongoing improvement, driven by direct collaboration daily, with Exponential-e now established as a trusted partner.

Every point of contact with end user support is tracked and monitored, and end users can provide real-time feedback on their experiences. This has resulted in 75% of tickets logged being resolved at the first point of contact, which, in turn, raised end user support's NPS score from 57, in the first live month of operations, to 90, with a 20% increase in users willing to offer feedback. Since then, the team has built on this success, recently hitting the milestone of more than 5,000 gold ratings.

This partnership continues to evolve, with ongoing collaboration between teams from both organisations ensuring IT can continue to play a key role in delivering world-class service quality to citizens across every region in which Solent is active.

About Tandem Money

Tandem is 'The Good Green Bank', a fully regulated digital app‐based bank founded on the idea of putting customers' needs first whilst helping them save more than just their money by pushing for a sustainable future. The acquisition of green lender Allium in 2020, an established green homes lender, accelerated Tandem's mission into the green space. Tandem offers savings, mortgages, and loans to help customers green their properties, and eventually their lives.

Challenges

The key driver behind Tandem's ongoing digital transformation was earning a full banking license in 2018 - something that had been a core focus of their infrastructure's evolution. This meant their infrastructure would need to fulfil all legal and compliance obligations around the handling of financial data, and also demonstrate the highest standard of operational resilience.

At the time, Tandem's IT and telephony infrastructure was hosted at various separate data centres, while their banking application was hosted on AWS services, and a separate site set aside for workplace recovery. Although multiple sites were involved here, the whole network depended on the London office, creating a single point of failure.

After a comprehensive evaluation of various suppliers, Tandem engaged with Exponential‐e to ensure these critical elements could be securely interconnected in order to maximise performance and scalability and ensure all requirements for full bank status were achieved. Exponential‐e's deep experience in the financial sector was critical here, providing Tandem with complete confidence that the partnership would provide a positive contribution to their journey.

Solution 

The networking solution delivered by Exponential‐e interconnected all Tandem sites via a high-performance WAN - a fully managed low‐latency solution that ensured consistent performance across all sites. This was implemented by a dedicated Exponential‐e account team, who project managed every stage of the deployment to ensure there would be no service disruption and that Tandem's long-term goals remained the primary focus throughout the deployment and beyond.

Critically, this fulfilled all compliance requirements regarding the handling and storage of financial data, while ensuring Tandem's teams would have the right tools at their fingertips at all times. To ensure a disruption free migration process, secure connections were created between Exponential-e's self‐owned network and Tandem's AWS services, allowing for a successful consolidation of the different elements of their infrastructure, and providing IT teams with a higher level of control and visibility.

As the partnership between Tandem and Exponential‐e evolved, a combination of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Office 365 was established as the ideal combination of solutions to further optimise Tandem's overall efficiency and enable effortless collaboration between their various teams, regardless of where they were located, with security policies applied automatically and role‐based segregation opening up a wide range of opportunities for remote working.

Throughout 2020, when the COVID‐19 pandemic forced organisations worldwide to rapidly transition to a remote workforce, the inherent flexibility and scalability of Tandem's infrastructure and a robust business continuity plan showed its true worth, as the entire workforce were able to begin working remotely with minimal disruption to day‐to‐day operations, and no compromise in terms of security and compliance. This option had already been utilised on an ad‐hoc basis by Tandem's engineers, but a scenario where it would need to be utilised on a company‐wide basis had been considered and factored into the business continuity plan, with tests taking place to ensure such measures would be viable, should they ever be needed.

In this way, Tandem has demonstrated how the right infrastructure, with the support of the right technology partner, provides organisations in even the most challenging sectors with the agility to pivot in response to unexpected, large‐scale shifts in the digital landscape. Tandem's long‐term digital transformation continues, with plans in place to bring its core banking suite in house and into the Cloud, for a further layer of control and flexibility.