Background

Founded in 1996, Lifecare International is a specialist health insurance intermediary headquartered in Dubai, UAE, with offices in Qatar, Kenya, and throughout East Africa. The company manages health insurance requirements for over 1,000 companies comprising of 25,000 individuals. Lifecare has grown to offer a range of products and services, like group life, disability, and key employee insurance, plus car, home, marine, and travel protection.

Challenges

Before using Samanage, Lifecare International was using Excel worksheets to deal with IT service management, and this proved very limiting. “We had no standard way of operating, no alert of breaches, and difficulty in reporting,” said David Kangethe, the IT manager.

The main challenge was tracking of incoming problems. Rapid company growth made it difficult to predict demand on IT resources, and there was little transparency in tracking IT services. The company needed the following:

• Faster, more organized response
• Structured processes for resolving problems
• Prompt, proactive response
• Performance tracking
• Excellent support from vendor
• Confidence that IT service tickets were being resolved

Solution

Lifecare International chose Samanage because of its intuitive interface and ease of use. They also liked that it follows ITIL standard framework, and had learned of good feedback from other Samanage users. The choice of an SaaS over an on-premise product was due to the lack of infrastructure capital involved, and the convenience of automatic software updates.

The company found Samanage to be very easy to implement and use. “After one training session, we have been using it for close to two months now with minimum difficulty,” said Kangethe.

Benefits

Samanage provides Lifecare International  with many benefits, including the ability to easily classify problems, easier tracking of IT assets and contracts, and a straightforward method for problem escalation. Installing Samanage allowed Lifecare to readily identify training needs, identify IT risks, easily carry out user satisfaction surveys, and build a knowledge base to allow IT services to become easier and more efficient over time.

“The key benefit has been to identify trends which enabled underlying issues to be identified quicker,” said Alasdare Lambert, Group CFO. “It’s also instrumental in creating greater awareness of user and management sides of the allocation of IT resources… and has led to better user expectation management.”