Industry: Financial Services
Employees: 1,000+

The Company

As a cooperative, PSCU Financial Services supports 1,100 financial institutions and is owned by 500+ member credit unions representing over 11 million accounts. Its Contact Centers handles more than 12 million inquiries a year. PSCU Financial Services maintains its headquarters and Eastern operations center in St. Petersburg, Florida. The company is also supported by a West Coast operations center based in Phoenix, Arizona and additional call center operations in Michigan. Established in 1977, the company provides a broad array of cost-effective, high quality financial services that include credit, signature and PIN debit, ATM, prepaid, bill payment, lending and contact center solutions.

The Challenge

With a heterogeneous network comprised of over 425 servers, frequent changes to the IT environment are inevitable. Prior to deploying a change management solution, PSCU Financial Service’s approach to the outages caused by unplanned or unauthorized change to the IT environment was “find it and fix it” - and then the problem was often forgotten.

As the company continued to grow, it became obvious to the IT organization that they had to become more efficient in managing their changes. And as a financial services organization, they had the additional corporate commitment to achieve PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance.

The SunView Software Solution

OPSCU Financial Services decided it was time to implement a change management system. Because they had recently chosen to adopt ITIL best practices, they narrowed their scope to vendors that adhered to the ITIL framework. After investigating a number of change management products, it quickly became clear that ChangeGear™ Change Management from SunView Software was the best fit for the company.

From the beginning, choosing ChangeGear was the right decision. According to Steve Lattman, Director of Enterprise Systems at PSCU Financial Services, “Our ChangeGear deployment was highly successful and remarkably easy, and the support team at SunView provided us outstanding support throughout the process.”

“Our biggest challenge going into this project was defining our change management process,” said Steve. According to Steve, the other component critical to the success of the project was having insight into every stage of the process - from change requests to change approvals to when the changes are officially closed - and the ability to easily generate detailed reports on this activity.

The Results

Using ChangeGear, PSCU Financial Services has automated the creation, tracking and approval of change requests, which is an improvement over the company’s previous ad-hoc and often inconsistent change practices. As a result, IT is now more efficient, PCI audits are easier and faster, and the organization as a whole benefits from fewer IT service interruptions.

With ChangeGear Change Management, the IT staff at PSCU Financial Services also has a much clearer understanding of the way changes affect their IT infrastructure. “With ChangeGear we now have total visibility into our change activities. This visibility enables us to identify key performance indicators that help us quickly spot trends so the IT staff can take the necessary action to correct the situation,” commented Steve.

And the results are impressive. Since deploying ChangeGear, Steve estimates that the PCI compliance audit reports that once required over 10 hours of time to produce, now take less than 3 hours - and that time continues to decrease as they continue to optimize their change process. “ChangeGear has been incredibly beneficial to our organization,” continued Steve. “It has met and exceeded our change management expectations.”