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Saudi Post Opts for Microsoft Technologies to Reduce Costs and Increase Productivity

Riyadh, January 4^th 2010: Microsoft announced that Saudi Post , the official postal service of Saudi Arabia has opted for the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) to improve business efficiency and lower overall operating costs. The MOF is currently being used for service desk improvements and the operation of their Data Center - Network Operations Center (NOC) that enables enhanced communication between Saudi Post and its customers. In addition, the MOF framework has helped Saudi Post increase productivity by 25% and improve first line incident resolution rates from 23% to over 60%.

Commenting on the announcement Eng. Majed Al Esmail, CIO - Saudi Post , said "We found MOF very helpful in establishing the NOC and overcoming challenges. MOF helped us create the right team structure, clear roles and responsibilities for every team member, the right mission for the NOC, and the right processes for systems and applications for the production environment. Furthermore, we envision proactively preventing 80 percent of major IT service failures and resolving any issues within 24 hours, if they happen. A primary benefit gained was that we were able to use our existing tools and resources to implement MOF best practices and achieve our service level targets."

"The NOC continual service improvement plan (SIP) was designed in such a way that allows Saudi Post culture to gradually absorb these service and measurement culture changes", said Khalid Hakim, the IT Operations Consulting Lead, Microsoft. "The SIP program has made a positive impact on the most tangible business services of Saudi Post . This includes higher reliability and availability of IT services that support Saudi Post business processes and cost reduction due to streamlined operations and more efficient staff utilization," he added.

To support the goals of the current and next-generation postal services, the Saudi Post IT department wanted to adopt an international IT service management methodology - Microsoft Operations Framework /MOF- to improve their postal services reliability and availability through the centralization of their IT Service Desk to manage users requests and incidents more effectively and efficiently and unifying IT operations in a more structured and optimized style at their Network Operations Center (NOC).

Saudi Post started working on the Service Desk improvement project (part of the SIP) addressing several areas-to-improve, that resulted in a higher ability to manage incidents, improved incident resolution rate from 23% to over 60%, boost in customer satisfaction, reduced operating costs, and increased team productivity. Then Saudi Post focused on creating the Network Operations Center (NOC) - Saudi Post data center- operations practices. This helped Saudi Post reduce operating costs, increase NOC team productivity by 25%, improve service availability and reliability, gain more value from IT documentation, make NOC operations more structured and optimized, and improve Business/IT alignment. The NOC is now seen as the heart of IT, operating and supporting the most critical systems at Saudi Post . It is also positioned as the 2^nd line of support after the Service Desk.

Saudi Post adopted MOF because it is simple, relevant, practical and concise. For more information about the Microsoft Operations Framework, go to www.microsoft.com/mof

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For more information:
Mohammed Jaradat / Malik Abdullrahman
Tel: +966 1 2177250
Fax: +966 1 4640051
Email: m.jaradat@asdaa.com, m.abdullrahman@asdaa.com

© Press Release 2010