EBank – Export Development Bank of Egypt

Streamlining support and application development with containerization

SMAX is designed to deliver AI-driven smart IT service management (ITSM) to take productivity and service experience to new heights. The EBank team was attracted to SMAX’s smart self-service capabilities. With a modern user interface and an intuitive service catalogue, users are encouraged to find their own solutions or to create a smart ticket that is then auto-categorized and auto-routed to the relevant team. The native SMAX mobile application means that users can request support from anywhere. Processes, workflows, and tasks are automated with many out-of-the-box best practice integrations to existing tools within the EBank infrastructure. As a financial organization, compliance is key, and the team liked the SMAX ITIL-driven controls and enhancements.

The streamlined support and service process is managed by 80 service agents and serves nearly 1,700 users across the bank with 40 technical teams and 10 non-IT teams within the organization. The service catalog was populated with over 320 offerings to support a diverse user base. The service team processes on average 3,950 service or supports requests and 580 incidents monthly. The team also works on approximately 50 change requests each month. These are split between regular change requests, emergency, and pre-approved ones, each following a different automated SMAX workflow.

Helmy commented, “SMAX gave us an open platform that allowed us to work with some of our key departments on customizing workflows and applications to suit our business requirements. We were pleased to discover that SMAX’s containerization capabilities provided us with easy and codeless development functionality through its Studio feature. As a result, the workflow was developed in no time. We were also able to smoothly integrate it into our existing process. Containerization proved a key feature for us, as it enables seamless upgrades, self-healing capabilities, and we can scale up much more flexibly when needed.”

Automating password reset workflow and end-to-end asset tracking

EBank also leverages OpenText™ Operations Orchestration (OO) to automate, integrate, and orchestrate any IT process, as well as OpenText™ Universal Discovery and CMDB to discover, map, and manage CIs across the environment. Both solutions natively integrate with SMAX through standard APIs and connectors.

The first phase of the SMAX implementation focused on the introduction of automated support and service requests, incident and change management, and an easy-to-use service catalogue to encourage user self-service.

As password queries were a regular request item, the team created an automated workflow to guide users through resetting their own passwords, without needing support intervention.

Thanks to the SMAX integration with Universal Discovery and CMDB, the organization is working to establish SMAX as an asset and configuration management tool, with attributes added to CIs and converted to assets. By connecting this SMAX-based asset management framework to the IT budgeting system created, any asset can be tracked throughout its lifecycle: a full circle of transparency including budget, procurement, invoicing, and contract management.

Managing IT budgets and supporting human capital with automation

Non-IT departments, such as HR, Administration, Finance, and Corporate Communications, also benefit hugely from SMAX and its native integration capability. The EBank Service Management department implemented an innovative SMAX solution to a problem recognized by many other departments. It wanted to better control the IT financial process. This starts when a user requests a specific application or hardware.

In the manual process, offers would be requested from vendors, this would raise an internal memo that would be circulated around many stakeholders from IT, finance, and administration, for input and approval. Once a vendor had been agreed, a purchase order was raised, and any invoices received were balanced against this. With an IT budget of many millions of dollars generating hundreds of invoices it could take a couple of months before a purchase order reached the vendor. Plus, there was a very real risk of human error and lost documents along the way, causing even more delays.

Helmy commented, “Customizing a SMAX workflow to automate this process was easy, thanks to the codeless development function. We now manage all stakeholders’ approval through one workflow, with SMAX sending automated reminders if items get stuck. Each budget item has a SMAX record containing signed and scanned documentation, including memos, purchase orders, and invoices. This creates better tracking and full transparency for any of our IT projects, supporting reporting and vastly streamlining the process. Today, we can issue purchase orders within a week, using the SMAX-driven process.”

Enabling regulatory and security compliance

The vision is to use the newly implemented SMAX and OO automated workflows to apply and manage ISO 27001 security controls as best practice in information security. The bank’s compliance team is in the process of developing OO approval workflows to streamline security processes.

The OO workflows were used to optimize performance in EBank IT operations and apply more stringent security controls. The OpenText ITOM solutions support secure file transfer to ensure that sensitive information securely travels between different locations.