Industry: Business Process Outsourcing Services
Employees: 12,000

The Company

Stream Global Services, Inc. is a leading provider of business process outsourcing (BPO) services focused on the complex, voice-based segment of customer care services delivered from North America and the Philippines. Founded in 1999, the company provides a range of services including technical support, customer service, sales and customer retention from both onshore and offshore locations.

The Challenge

Stream’s IT organization, which consists of over 200 staff members located in 15 locations worldwide, initiates between 400 and 500 changes per month. Prior to selecting a formal change management solution, Stream used a modified Microsoft SharePoint server to track change requests, but it was unreliable and enabled security breaches. For example, one user could login as multiple users and open, approve, implement and close the change -- all from the same computer.

This method of tracking change was quickly becoming problematic. Given the stringent Sarbanes-Oxley regulations imposed on document change controls Stream faced as they prepared to issue an IPO in March of 2007, their ad-hoc method of tracking change was no longer acceptable. They had to find a reliable and proven system to track, manage and document the lifecycle of every change within their IT infrastructure.

Preventing system outages was an equally important challenge for Stream. “Our databases and telecom systems are critical to our business,” said Mike Hale, change control manager at Stream. “Our call centers handle customer service, inbound sales, outbound sales and technical support for market leaders in various industries, and system and telephone outages in our call centers mean our agents aren’t able to handle those calls. Because our revenue is tied to our call levels, this directly affects our bottom line.”

The SunView Software Solution

Prior to selecting ChangeGear from SunView Software, Stream briefly considered solutions from other change management vendors but found the cost too high and the implementation time too lengthy.

Ease of use, fast and simple deployment, and low cost were all important factors in Stream’s decision to purchase ChangeGear. “It was critical to the success of the project that we find a change management solution that was easy to learn and use, even for non-IT users,” said Mike. “With ChangeGear, we experienced fast adoption within our IT organization, but we also had business users up and running on the system quickly, with very little training.” And ChangeGear’s flexibility allowed Stream to easily customize the product according to the specific needs of each department. SunView’s Professional Services team came on-site to assist in the installation and to help with some of the more complex customizations they chose to make.

The Results

Stream’s ChangeGear implementation went live to production on January 2, 2007. At that time, the company was averaging 95 percent system uptime on a monthly basis. In October, 2007 -- just nine months after deploying ChangeGear -- the company hit their corporate goal of 99.999 percent uptime for the first time.

“Keeping our systems up and running is a huge issue for our Stream. Our call centers make money based on the number of calls we make and handle. If our system is down, our agents can’t make or receive calls and the direct result is lost revenue,” said Mike. “We can directly attribute our success in reaching our uptime goal of ‘five 9s’ to our ChangeGear solution.”

Other benefits Stream has realized since deploying ChangeGear is enforced accountability. “We can now track a change throughout its lifecycle and see everything that happened at every stage as well as who was involved with each change. And with the processes we’ve enforced through ChangeGear, we no longer worry about SOX compliance-we’ve already passed our first internal audit with flying colors.”