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Hotchkiss deployed Numara™ FootPrints® to centrally manage, track, and control all help desk issues. The school also required a system to automate the process of routing work orders and service requests for its maintenance department.
The Challenge The IT department at Hotchkiss supports more than 500 students and 250 faculty and staff members spread out across a 550-acre campus. The Systems and Network Administrators were managing various IT systems and providing support - they were understaffed and deluged with hundreds of service requests and technical problems with no structured system for technicians to centrally manage, track, and control these inquiries. The technical team was unable to efficiently perform its primary systems and network administration duties with the influx of desktop support requests - some of which were very repetitive. Faculty, staff, and students were making requests via email and phones - which were then tracked strictly by email and paper forms. It was difficult to keep track of resolved and open issues, and requests were easily lost. The Systems and Network Administration team was given the directive to implement a support automation tool to address these changes, while improving the overall caliber of service and responsiveness. As a separate but related initiative, Hotchkiss needed a centralized vehicle to submit, track, and assign work order requests for its Plant Operations Department. A work orders system, which had been written in-house for the department, was successfully used for years, but it was now becoming inefficient. Work order requests were written on slips of paper, which were then sent to the Plant Operations Department where someone would manually enter them into the system. The managers of the departments (electrical, plumbing, painting, grounds, etc.) would then see what tickets were theirs, print them out, and update the record when they were finished. What was needed was an efficient, paperless process to enable end users to create tickets requests without the need for someone to manually re-key the request. The Numara FootPrints Solution @ Hotchkiss
Hotchkiss employs two full-time agents to support the hundreds of students, faculty, and staff across the campus. Two other agents manage the internal work order process, which is supported by twelve facilities and maintenance technicians. Based on their needs, the school selected Numara FootPrints to drive two main projects: one for internal help desk and another for work order automation.
Numara FootPrints provided Hotchkiss with an easy-to-use web-based support system where little training was required to have agents and the school's students and faculty up and running on the system quickly. Most importantly, Hotchkiss needed to ensure that the ease-of-use and convenience of Numara FootPrints would encourage user adoption versus calling in a problem.
Reinforcing the open standards requirement, Hotchkiss also needed Linux support, plus the capability to interface with existing LDAP-based corporate address books such as Novell's NDS and Groupwise email system. Numara FootPrints also provides dynamic access to existing Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and other LDAP-based corporate address books.
Numara FootPrints also provides Hotchkiss with an easy way to deliver online self-service, enabling students and faculty to submit requests via the internet and view the continuously growing knowledge base for quick answers to common problems. By providing this capability, Hotchkiss is off-loading a significant number of service requests thus allowing its IT group to optimize resources - without compromising responsiveness. "We wanted faculty and students to play a larger role in the help desk process and gave them the tools, via Numara FootPrints, to help themselves," says Bill Arlofski, UNIX Systems Administrator at Hotchkiss. As a result, call volumes have been reduced and have allowed agents to troubleshoot and resolve other, more complex problems.
Reporting was also key. "We needed a mechanism to report to management on how time was being spent and gauge the effectiveness of our support activity. Plus, management wanted to know how many work orders were opened and closed at the end of each month, " says Arlofski.
The Results Since implementation of Numara FootPrints in September 2002, over 1500 help desk project tickets have been entered into the Hotchkiss system. Additionally, Hotchkiss has logged approximately 1100 facilities management and work order tickets since October. Numara FootPrints has empowered the faculty and staff to play a larger role in the school's help desk, allowing them to submit tickets and search for solutions on their own. This speeds up the issue resolution times and frees up the help desk staff to concentrate on more complex problems, thereby improving their productivity. "There are no more requests slipping through the cracks. We know when requests are submitted, that they are routed to the right people without duplicate assignments, how many requests are in progress, what has been resolved, who resolved it, how long it took - with all this information saved in a shareable knowledge base," said Arlofski. "We have seen a tremendous improvement in communication throughout the school. Before Numara FootPrints, we took on a much more reactive role in solving requests. Now, we are much more organized and proactive." For the full PDF version of this case study, click here.
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