SUBWAY(R) Purchasing Cooperative, IPC, Serves Up Fresh Franchisee Support With Change Dynamics on the Menu

CEDAR KNOLLS, NJ--(Marketwire - May 20, 2009) - Change Dynamics, a leading provider of IT service management software and solutions for Fortune 1000 or Russell 2000 companies, today announced that IPC, an independent SUBWAY® franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative, has selected its flagship product, IT Symphony™, to help the company facilitate ITIL best practices to support 25,000 SUBWAY® restaurants across the U.S. and Canada with new helpdesk and network change management solutions.

IPC is responsible for procuring SUBWAY® food, packaging, equipment, and services on behalf of franchisees in the U.S. and Canada through negotiating price, supply, and distribution terms. In addition to negotiating the items themselves, IPC enters into contracts at all levels of the supply chain to bring cost efficiencies to SUBWAY® franchisees. In 2006, the company's usual IT support procedures needed enhancement to sustain the newly embarked in-house applications.

IT Symphony helped IPC mature their IT processes as their systems grew in complexity. Anthony Ronconi, Director of IT for IPC, explains, "When we were smaller, with fewer in-house applications, we could keep things up and running through the heroics of a few key individuals solving problems. As the number of systems and applications increased, so did their mission-critical nature and complexity. With new applications such as member tracking, website support for franchisees as well as point-of-sale (POS) and SUBWAY® Card processing (www.mysubwaycard.com), it was more difficult to meet the business needs. We had to put in the ITIL best practices so we could better meet SLAs."

IPC researched half a dozen products and found that some big-name brands were too expensive or rigid for the company. "While we invest in IT and see it as a strategic asset, there are limitations, some solutions are just too much," Ronconi pointed out. A key criterion for IPC was the ability to customize the ITIL workflow to best meet the company's needs of fewer steps and approval processes to go through.

With IT Symphony, IPC was able to customize the ITIL workflow for their specific needs, automating the whole ITIL process, "So we did not get bogged down in red tape and paper pushing. Instead IPC could track it all electronically and facilitate the processes to make it more efficient," Ronconi added. With a solid ITIL process in place, IPC chose to implement Change Dynamics' Service Desk and Change Management solutions.

Change Dynamics' Service Desk allows IPC's IT users to report or log system anomalies into one unified area, in lieu of verbally reporting issues to IT personnel. Ronconi continues, "When an application is down, we know it! We want to know when the system is not functioning properly or providing slow performance. It could be indicative of a larger problem coming down the road and would also be good to know if this is being experienced by more than one person. Change Dynamics' Service Desk immediately sheds light on these situations."

Change Dynamics' Change Management solution organizes and stabilizes IPC's production environment so only approved changes are implemented. Change Management enables the company to quickly determine the root cause of problems, "because we can analyze the most recent changes to the system," Ronconi said. "There is an eighty-percent chance that one of the changes are impacting or causing that particular problem we are researching to resolve." Moving forward, IPC plans to implement Change Dynamics' CMDB and VIZ solutions.

Change Dynamics' CMDB will help IPC centralize all their IT asset documentation, applications and contracts while also tying the IT assets to change requests. VIZ for IT Symphony will enable IPC to map different IT components to specific end users in a network community and determine what franchisees are impacted by slow Website applications or other IT issues.

For a closer look at IT Symphony, please view the demo at: http://www.cd-it.com/change-dynamics-demo-lead.html.

For additional information on how Change Dynamics' solutions can improve IT efficiency, download Change Dynamics' white paper, A Five Point Economic Plan To Improve IT Process Efficiency and Cut Costs.

About Change Dynamics

Founded in 2004, Change Dynamics helps enterprise clients across all industries implement change governance solutions to improve IT control and realize greater efficiencies across information technology development and delivery. Change Dynamics brings to every client their deep domain knowledge of IT change management best practice policy and process, and years of real world experience using industry recognized frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). These best practices have now been captured into a powerful change governance solution -- IT Symphony. For more information visit Change Dynamics on the web at www.cd-it.com.

About IPC

IPC is an independent SUBWAY® franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative. IPC negotiates the lowest cost for goods and services, while improving quality, enhancing competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY® restaurants and their customers. Moreover, IPC is committed to delivering returns to its members year after year. By organizing as a cooperative, the business initiatives are set by the owner members and are benchmarked by the active participation of an elected Board of Directors. For more information, please visit, www.ipcoop.com.

Contact Information: For more information, please contact: Michael Emerton BridgeView Marketing (for Change Dynamics) (603) 766-3688 mike@bridgeviewmarketing.com