Emergency Transition of North America Field Service Support
A Tier 1 Managed Services Provider (MSP) offers IT services such as remote monitoring, troubleshooting, and support for network and system performance.
Client Overview
A Tier 1 Managed Services Provider (MSP) with 3,000+ supported locations across various verticals (Financial, Manufacturing, Commercial, Healthcare and Life Sciences) contracted for IT Field Services support. Services consisted of onsite break/fix, equipment replacement and smart hands across North America.
Issue
The services were subcontracted to a large Field Services Contractor in North America by the Tier 1 MSP. The services and cost structure had been under constant re-negotiations to lower costs to the customer without alternative services provided to the contractor. The negotiations broke off when the financial model of the contractor could no longer sustain a profitable effort, which resulted in the contractor terminating the contract and removing all support to the MSP and their customers.
Recovery of Service Support
GTN was notified of the situation on the evening of the contract termination by the MSP. Fortunately, GTN had a long-standing relationship with the MSP. Working with the MSP, GTN attacked this critical issue on two fronts simultaneously, Operationally and Statement of Work definition. This article only focuses on the Operational effort of this transition.
Operational Stand Up
Here is where a company like GTN shines. GTN is large enough to accommodate major clients yet maintain a direct relationship with the managers on the ground. With this effort, several of the Senior Executives worked on the transition alongside the managers then turned the effort over. Speed and agility were critical in successfully executing this emergency transition, both were achieved.
Priorities
Demonstrate how GTN and the MSP triaged the situation and stabilized all services within three days of being engaged by the MSP.
How GTN Reacted
The first piece of information was the list of sites GTN was to service. The site list was cross-referenced against a database of currently utilized Background and Drug Tested Resources to find gaps.
Since GTN has an extensive and deep pool of Resources, existing resources could cover ~70% of the locations within 50-mile round trip criteria. Fortunately, most of the remaining gap was mitigated by using our 100-mile round trip criteria.
This left ~ 3% of all sites classified remote on Day 1 of service. GTN used these criteria until the Resource Pool was augmented to achieve ~90% site coverage within a 50-mile round trip. 
In addition to establishing our resource pool for all 3,000+ sites, GTN needed a way to receive tickets from the MSP to dispatch onsite technicians. The longer term answer was integration into the customer’s instance of ServiceNow.
However, the urgency of the situation did not afford all parties the time needed for an integration between ticketing systems. GTN utilized our existing dispatch software which was primarily used for Project/Statement of Work efforts with our clients. We licensed the MSP’s users and customized the software within 48 hours, which allowed our client to provide GTN ticket information using our system until we had integration with ServiceNow several weeks later. 
Summary
The MSP was able to quickly react and fill the void in service by choosing GTN. GTN’s ability to quickly place resources into action on all fronts made this emergency transition project a success. The partnership between GTN and MSP helped circumvent a difficult situation which culminated in a pleased client with avoidance of costly penalties to the MSP and any work stoppage.
