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Technicians can be more productive with integrated asset management.
End-users need a fast and easy way to get answers and submit requests.
Being able to expand to facilities, HR, legal and other groups is important.
Industry: Construction
End-users: 1,000
Previous System: Manage Engine
When shopping for a new IT Service Management or Enterprise Service Management platform, there are a few key factors to consider when evaluating what tool is right for your organization.
To understand these better, Andrew Graf, Chief Product Offer at Velentix sat down with Jay Reymond, Senior Engineer in IT from B&I Contractors, a mechanical systems contracting service company based in Florida, to talk about the company’s ITSM vendor evaluation experience. B&I recently went to market for a new ITSM platform after outgrowing its existing system.
“It’s really important to sit down and think about the pains you’re looking to fix and the opportunities you want to take advantage of,” Graf said. “These aren’t features necessarily, they are stories that resonate with a lot of people within your organization – like the amount of time wasted on manual tasks. The ultimate measure of success, for any tool, is going to be if everyone agrees that it solves a high-impact pain or helps you move forward.”
Before you even start to look at vendors and get demos, it’s important to sit down and identify the pains you have with your existing solution. By doing this you can better identify ITSM/ESM vendors that offer products with features and functionalities that can solve those pain points – whether that’s the automated routing of tickets, the ability to quickly spin up an easy-to-use self-service portal, dynamic forms or integration and automation capabilities that can help you save time and get rid of redundant, manual processes.
Asset management and contract renewal tracking were two big pain points they were trying to solve in IT with the new software, Reymond said, “Employees really needed to be able to track and report on these things very quickly – this was a huge pain point for us prior to Velentix. “
“Making any kind of customization in our old ITSM tool was a project in and of itself – they had poor documentation, and it would take days to complete. With Velentix we can make changes in minutes.”
Reymond and his team knew they needed an ITSM tool that could help them streamline their processes and make things more efficient for them in the long run as they continue to scale their business, but they also needed that same platform to support their immediate ITSM needs.
“We had to really dig through the tools that are available and figure out which ITSM software made the most sense for our business needs,” he said. B&I ended up selecting Velentix as the new ITSM tool for the company.
“It’s so quick and easy, we’re making massive strides. We absolutely love it.”
For Reymond at B&I, their existing ITSM tool simply could no longer support their business’s growth. “We had outgrown the IT Service Management platform we were using, and quickly realized we needed to find a new tool that could support us,” he said. So, they started their process by doing exactly as Graf recommends and put together their list of pain points before starting their ITSM search.
Next, Graf recommends identifying the opportunities that are out there for your business that you can achieve with the right tool. These are things you can’t do right now because your existing tool is missing something and can’t help to move your business forward.
To ensure the best overall ITSM vendor evaluation, especially if you’re using an RFP process to find vendors, Graf says to articulate these stories about pain points and opportunities up front, “Make sure you share those stories and really give vendors a chance to show you how their product can, or in some cases can’t, fix those issues. After being in this business for as long as I have, this is the type of thing I would be doing to make sure I’m finding the best fit.”
“Any service management platform is going to manage tickets,” adds Graf. “That’s why identifying a platform that will address your pain points and help with new opportunities is most critical for understanding fit.”
Within Velentix you have the ability to quickly spin up a self-service portal supported by a knowledge base. Reymond said this was another key feature for B&I when looking at ITSM tools.
“One of the big things we were looking for is how can we have our users help themselves,” he said. “We support almost 1,000 users and most of them are in the field – so we needed a cloud-based tool that supports self-service.”
And Reymond said Velentix has worked out “phenomenally.” In fact, they recently had an instance where having a knowledge base worked out wonderfully, “We have a vendor who told us that they were going to do an update and needed every user to create a new login using SSO,” he said. “This is a 20-step process, and we had 280 users that needed to do this. Instead of sending out instructions in an email that would likely be ignored, I created a knowledge base article with step-by-step instructions with screenshots and sent the link to that article to all of the managers explaining they needed to have their users do this. Within a very short amount of time, most of them completed this task. Being able to make it nice and pretty on the knowledge base with everything just one click away made all the difference.”
Reymond said they’ve already found that as they add articles, users are going to their portal and looking for answers before putting in a ticket – even when out in the field, “This has made a great impact on IT, we’ve seen a decrease in our average daily ticket volume as a result.”
In addition to finding a tool that solved IT pain points, B&I wanted to be able to take their ITSM platform and extend its use outside of IT to departments like Human Resources and Facilities for more of an Enterprise Service Management approach to service management and delivery.
“Asset management for facilities is huge,” Reymond said. “It was important for us to have a tool that could be used in other departments and help them be able to do things, like asset management, that they couldn’t do before. As we keep implementing new things with Velentix we are finding different features and functionalities that are great for different parts of the company that we hadn’t even considered before. We never really thought we’d be able to find a single system that could be used across several different departments, and that’s been a great benefit for us.”
And with this ESM strategy now in place, Reymond said they are well positioned for the future, “Velentix solved our pain points. Finding this kind of tool is really going to help us take things to the next level, quite quickly.”
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