What are managed services?
In general, managed services are the transfer of day-to-day operations of a specific function from your company to a third party. For example, if you own a fast food franchise, your marketing services are managed by the franchisor. The concept is to outsource functions which are not unique to your specific business. There are four primary benefits. First, it frees up resources, allowing you to focus on your business and what you do best. Secondly, your service is now provided by company who is an expert in that field. A venture capital firm may be an expert in risk assessment and business performance management. However, they are probably not an expert in salesforce automation and call center operations. Thirdly, most managed services are provided at a flat monthly rate. This provides for predictable budgeting of the service. Finally, it reduces the overall cost due to quantities of scale.

In the IT industry there are several different types of managed services which can be contracted on an a la carte basis.

1. Help Desk - This provides basic desktop support on a reactive basis. The end user submits a trouble ticket and a technician contacts the user. The technician then fixes the problem remotely.
2. Server Administration - Technicians will perform preventative maintenance on your servers. Monitoring systems will proactively alert technicians to issues. On demand support and account maintenance is also provided.
3. Network Management - This is a proactive network monitoring service. It tracks bandwidth usage, network loads and the proper functioning of network devices.
4. Security Services - This can include network security management, firewall/vpn management, anti-virus services, spam filtering and spyware protection and removal.
5. Managed Backup - This can include offsite backup as well as disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
6. Training Services - Managed training services is a unique offering from LogiCore Solutions. An effective training program for your end users and in-house IT personnel is an essential aspect of workforce development and workflow efficiency. We will design a custom training program for your employees based on their skills, job tasks and future goals within your company.

What is the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning?
Disaster recovery (DR) is process by which an organization restores critical operations that were lost as a result of a natural or man-made disaster. It includes plans for restoring data and communications as well as contingency plans in the event key personnel are unavailable. Disaster recovery planning is a part of the larger business continuity planning (BCP). BCP involves the preparation and testing of measures designed to protect ongoing business operations.

What is knowledge management?
Every business is as unique as the individual employees. Therefore, each business has a proprietary body of knowledge. In some cases, this can be fairly straight-forward such as a written policy or operations manual. However, frequently the most important organizational knowledge in contained within the heads of a select few personnel. The larger the organization, the more distributed and less available this information becomes. Knowledge management is the process through which an organization can formally record this information into a living system.

What is business intelligence?
Business Intelligence (BI) is the process and application of technology to integrate, aggregate, analyze and present business information to key managers and executives in support of better decision making. This includes drill-down and drill-through reporting, scorecards, executive dashboards, pivot-table analyses, visualizations and statistical data mining. These systems can be applied to any part of a business including sales, manufacturing, finance and human resources. BI plays a significant role in business performance management.

What is business performance management?
Business Performance Management (BPM) is a cycle by which a business is continually improved. It involves gathering and analyzing data (BI), using that data to transform the stategy of the business, monitoring the effects, controlling the positive outcomes and then starting the cycle over.

What is Lean Six Sigma?
Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology. It combines the concepts from Lean Manufacturing (reduce waste to increase speed) and Six Sigma (quality improvement). Working together, Lean Six Sigma focuses on increasing speed to increase quality. While this may sound counter-intuitive, the concept has proven sound. Speed is increased not through haste but rather through the elimination of activities which do not add value. This inherently leads to better quality.