Arriva: Company-Wide ITSM and Knowledge Management

The challenge

Arriva had grown through acquisitions, leaving multiple separate IT departments across the UK with their own tools and little visibility between teams. By 2016, the group had brought IT under one roof in name, but functionally it was still fragmented; no cross-department reporting and no single ITSM tool. The company ran everything from Excel to ad-hoc systems. Leadership recognised this was unsustainable and restructured IT from the ground up.

Our approach

Following a competitive tender in 2017, Arriva selected Cherwell Software's ITSM platform and chose a partner that could mature with them. We supported implementation from September through to go-live in November 2017, with IT centralised (around 230 staff) largely in Sunderland. We focused on portal adoption and knowledge management: a user-friendly service request experience, automated joiners process, and self-service for ordering equipment. When the compliance team needed a way to log GDPR incidents and subject access requests, we helped build a custom GDPR module on top of Cherwell in time for the regulation going live.

Before & after

The outcome

Portal use for service requests grew month on month and reached 25% of all requests. A second version of the ITSM portal was launched based on user feedback. Staff now use the portal to order new IT equipment with an 'Amazon-like' experience; the five-day SLA for new equipment is hit 95% of the time, up from around 20% before. The GDPR module gave the business a single place to log and manage incidents and subject access requests. The implementation delivered beyond expectations and set the foundation for continued maturity.