SLA Alignment services are the activities needed to ensure that the Service Level Agreements established with customers and trading partners align with the Technical Service Level Agreements of the business. This may seem like a common sense practice, but in many cases these two SLAs do not align at all.

Business Service Level Agreements are based upon trading practices between two businesses, whereas Technical Service Level Agreements are based upon the technical infrastructure meeting specific operational guidelines.

For example, a large customer may establish an SLA with your business. They are committing to 10,000 widgets per month, with orders arriving every week at various times of the day. The SLA further states that if an order is placed prior to noon, then the order will ship the same day.

The technical SLA is based upon all of the orders that are processed into and out of the company. These additional 10,000 widgets per month are evaluated based upon the current SLA in place to determine whether these new orders will exceed the volume, peak, or availability times of the infrastructure.

The technical SLA will ensure that the order volume will be able to process through the systems properly, but what about the business SLA that requires orders that are processed before noon to be shipped the same day?  Since this is considered a business issue by the technical team, it is often ignored and the technical solution needed to support this part of the SLA is non-existent.  When an order arrives at 11:30am and fails, it goes to the dead letter queue where it will be managed by an IT resource when they are available. They will reach out to Customer Service to ask them for the proper information to correct and then add it manually to the message. It will be resubmitted, but too late to be shipped that day. Your customer is upset that you failed to meet your SLA and they start looking for a replacement vendor.

StoneDonut provides SLA alignment to ensure that your business commitments are not impacted by your technology solutions. Our gap analysis will identify possible risks as well as solutions to mitigate them.