The Road to ServiceDesk Plus Christopher Burg American Transmission Co

The Road to ServiceDesk Plus Christopher Burg American Transmission Co

Introduction Team Leader – IT System Management Accountable for: – Service Desk – Data Centers – Server and storage infrastructure – Client hardware, desktop support Began working in IT support in 1995

About American Transmission Co Founded in 2001 First multi-state electric transmission-only utility Service area includes portions of Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois 9,400 circuit miles of transmission line 2.75 billion in total assets

Primary Challenges with Remedy 1. Significant Resource Overhead – Specialized skills needed to maintain system 2. Application Performance – Lack of proper maintenance impacted usability 3. Lack of email capture reduced ticket volume – Most emails were not re-entered into Remedy 4. User interface was not intuitive – No one likes to use ugly software 5. Information gathering challenging – Highly normalized database and inelegant reporting engine made simple queries anything but 6. Expensive!

Assessment Methodology Create master list of requirements Assign subjective weight based on business objectives Score each product 1-10 Compare total scores WARNING

Key Requirements Minimal administrative burden Robust feature set Good application performance that doesn’t degrade Reasonable cost Alignment with ITIL

Technology Constraints More Customizable Less Customizable Administrative Overhead Picking from the Gartner Magic Quadrant can be dangerous for small and mid-sized organizations with strong capitalization The airport metaphor: – Build me an airport, but don’t worry – we’ll only have three flights a day – In other words, support resource cost of entry for complex systems is high and not proportionate to usage patterns

Flexibility of ManageEngine More Customizable Less Customizable Administrative Overhead Standard Professional Enterprise Multiple versions of Service Desk Plus helped us decide what was right for our organization

Results with ManageEngine Greatly improved incident capture – Ticket volume increased over 100% in the first month – Email volume now 52% of total ticket volume Enhanced technician experience – Performance bottlenecks have been eliminated – Visually appealing, intuitive interface – Training focuses on process, not the tool

Results with ManageEngine Improved customer experience – Ticket creation notifications reassure customers – “Snapshot” surveys help improve service – Reminders drive better compliance with service levels Improved efficiency – Administrative overhead reduced from 1.0 FTE to 0.25 FTE – Greatly reduced annual cost

Results with ManageEngine Significantly enhanced Change Management – Online collaboration improves flexibility – Elimination of change approval meeting saves time – Record of approval creates regulatory audit trail – CAB integration improves business awareness

Why ATC Loves ManageEngine ManageEngine is a company that listens. We feel like we have an open dialogue that allows us to offer suggestions that improve the product, which helps us.

Thank you!