CBN ran a number of disparate commercial and home grown ticketing systems which lacked the business intelligence and processes needed across the entire organization. With so many systems to manage already CBN was looking to consolidate on a system that not only provided the requisite systems integration, but was also low maintenance.

LiveTime’s hardware appliance was the perfect solution, that was not only plug and play, but also provided the performance and security expected by CBN. A major advantage for LiveTime was the extensible Web Services API and pre-integration to existing infrastructure and services without the need for programmers.

For such a large organization it was challenging for CBN to find a solution to consolidate across all divisions with multiple layers of security and authentication providers. LiveTime was able to provide a unique solution using SSO to consolidate the business units and provide seamless access from within the organization and from any mobile device, including native iPhone and iPad clients.

Finally, LiveTime’s intuitive and context sensitive user interface made it easy for users to consume and develop services across multiple divisions while still working in a collegiate atmosphere within the product. An additional bonus was that the software seamlessly supported multiple languages. In this case it was important that users could use French or English interfaces just by changing the locale of the browser.

Challenge

Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust needed to increase the scale and scope of its helpdesk, to support a large increase in staff from the acquisition of several new services. The Trust needed to ensure that existing and new users spread across its many departments received well-integrated support.

The ICT team was struggling with email integration and communications with users. Previously, support staff were required to copy and paste information from emails into call logs, posing a significant drain on productivity.

“We wanted a solution that would automatically email users to keep them informed about the status of their support requests, and that could also automatically log calls and generate the relevant actions based on incoming emails,” said Tristan David, Head of ICT for Oxleas.

The Trust had previously been using HP OpenView, but found the solution too complex for its requirements and the software hard to configure and use. Having reached the end of vendor support, Oxleas took the opportunity to review other options that could better fit its requirements.

Solution

Oxleas wanted a solution that was easy to use and configure, and one that would integrate efficiently with its existing infrastructure. The Trust chose Novell Service Desk from LiveTime Software as a fully integrated service management tool to streamline and automate its IT support function.

“Novell Service Desk is very easy to use and to develop, so we felt that it was the best choice for the future,” said Tristan David. “The solution makes it easy to create automated workflows, and this is helping us to make much more effective use of email in our communications with users.”

Another selling point was Novell Service Desk’s modern Web 2.0 interface, which allows users to access the system via any web browser or mobile device without plugins. This makes it easy to create powerful self-service portals for users and allows both technicians and users to check the status on support calls and update them immediately from wherever they are.

Oxleas’ service desk manager was closely involved in the selection of the solution, and was highly impressed with its functionality. “She is very enthusiastic about the capabilities of Novell Service Desk, in particular around the potential it offers for future development and integration with Novell ZENworks,” said Tristan David. “When full integration is enabled in the near future, it will be even easier for the team to build a more responsive and automated support infrastructure.”

Finally, there was an important commercial aspect to the decision. For the same cost as bringing the previous solution back into support and adding the licences it needed, Oxleas was able to deploy a completely new Novell Service Desk environment that offers greater ease of use and more benefits.

“There would have been a significant cost involved in bringing the existing system up to the standard we needed and adding additional licences. In terms of pricing, Novell offered a very attractive solution,” said Tristan David.

Results

For Oxleas, two of the most important new capabilities offered by Novell Service Desk are its easy-to-use workflow engine and web-based self-service portals, which have vastly improved the team’s ability to communicate with users.

“One of our users’ most frequent complaints was that they didn’t know what was going on,” said Tristan David. “With Novell Service Desk, they can see which technician has been assigned to their call and can follow the progress through to resolution. Our experience in other areas tells us that users really like this kind of self-service approach.”

The team at Oxleas was able to seamlessly integrate Novell Service Desk into its existing infrastructure, and will soon be able to fully integrate it with its Novell ZENworks environment. This will deliver major benefits in terms of service automation and improved transparency.

The Novell solution includes built-in call timers, giving supervisors a clearer view of performance and enabling a more structured analysis of the effectiveness of existing processes. There are also plans to develop network monitoring tools that will log support calls automatically via email, so that the network team can respond even before the user is necessarily aware that there’s a fault.

Additionally, Novell Service Desk provides highly effective, user-friendly service management that enables technicians at Oxleas to work faster and more efficiently, and allows them to ultimately focus on core business tasks. As technicians can now check for new support calls while they are off-site, they can potentially resolve emerging issues on the spot, leading to less downtime for users.

“Novell Service Desk makes it faster and easier to provide technical support,” said Tristan David. “In practice, this translates into rapid resolution for our users, improved service and reduced day-to-day support costs, which helps us to improve patient care.”

About Aeroflex

Aeroflex Incorporated is a multi-faceted high technology company that designs, develops, manufactures and markets a diverse range of microelectronic and test and measurement products. Recognized for its space qualified and radiation hardened products used in satellite communications, the products support communication systems, networks and automatic test systems.

Challenge

Handling around 300 requests a week Aeroflex used multiple help desk solutions performing basic ticketing functions. Support was more reactive, rather than proactive, and the same problems were being solved again and again. Aeroflex needed a system that could reduce the level of effort required to resolve problems, leverage knowledge management and provide context of the call based on the underlying service.

Solution

“As a rapidly growing company we needed an enterprise solution that would scale well and service our needs across the entire organization from any browser”, said Mark Rodee, IT Manager at Aeroflex. “The total cost of ownership was an important factor, with a simple upgrade system, no full time administrator and support all ITIL best practices.”

“LiveTime provided a private cloud appliance that was up and running in less than 30 mins. After setting up a service catalog for our customers in LiveTime’s CMDB we were able to take requests in no time. We have been able to leverage the system beyond Incident Management and now use Change Management to help complete the lifecycle of the request when changes need to be made on the underlying infrastructure or service.”

“The main improvements have been to the service we have been able to provide and information we’ve been able to capture. Instead of flying blind on what issues are being raised, we can now effectively run our change management and desk side support operations through one system.”

“We ended up spending quite a bit more on licenses over a tradtional ticketing solution, but the quality of the product is much, much higher and provides many more features than grouplink.”

About Philadelphia Schools

The School District of Philadelphia is the eighth largest school district in the United States and services more than 250,000 students, 30,000 staff and 350 schools. Its mission is to provide high quality education that prepares, ensures and empowers all students to achieve their full potential.

Challenge

Committed to raising student achievement levels, the District implements wide reforms and restructuring measures and this extends to the facilities and infrastructure that underpin their education programs. Being an essential element, Information Technology is expected to perform at peak availability levels to enable students and staff to achieve at their highest level.

To this end the District has over 100 technicians managing 1000 service and support calls a week. Using Remedy as their service management tool, Philadelphia Schools found it was non-intuitive with high administrative overheads, and needed extensive maintenance support on each upgrade cycle. In an effort to better invest their time and financial resources, and after extensive research, they decided to replace multiple Remedy Servers with a single instance of LiveTime’s Service Management (ITSM) solution. 

Solution

LiveTime now provides a single point of contact for all help desk enquiries and is a centralized resource for Knowledge Base solutions, empowering technicians, staff and students when experiencing IT issues. A mission critical part of the District’s infrastructure, LiveTime’s Private Cloud Appliance provides more than 99 percent uptime and facilitates the rapid resolution of incidents.

With its single click upgrade process and reduced administration requirement, LiveTime allows technical staff to focus on adding value within the IT environment, resulting in lower incident volumes and improved service management processes. In addition to cost savings made from a lower annual maintenance fee, the reduction in training requirements have further benefited the IT budget’s bottom line.

“Since using LiveTime we have experienced shorter ticket times, quicker resolution in the field and easier access for the staff via the customer portal,” said Mr Edston Detrich, Help Desk Manager, School District of Philadelphia.

About NuVista Energy

NuVista Energy is an independent Canadian oil and natural gas exploration, development and production company with its common shares trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol “NVA”.

Challenge

With employees and contractors spread across the Western Canadian Oil Patch, it was difficult for NuVista Energy to consistently keep workstations running smoothly. In addition, as the business grew, the company needed a more sophisticated approach to service desk call management. “We had no software in place to manage support requests,” said Robert Cahoon, IT systems analyst for NuVista Energy Ltd. “To improve service to our users, we wanted greater visibility and accountability for problem resolution.”

The company needed a solution that would accommodate its heterogeneous environment. “We have a combination of cutting-edge technology as well as antiquated systems that we need to support so it was important to find a solution that would run on any operating system,” said Cahoon.

Solution

NuVista Energy began using Novell ZENworks® Configuration Management to remotely manage its workstations, bringing greater consistency in application and patch distribution. If a user reports an issue, a technician simply remote controls into the device so they can quickly resolve the problem. “Some of our offices are a 12-hour trip away, so having a tool like Novell ZENworks Configuration Management to remotely fix workstation issues has been a huge advantage,” said Cahoon.

As they began exploring service desk solutions, NuVista Energy turned to Adaris Technologies, a Novell Platinum Partner™. “After an extensive comparison of many of the industry’s top offerings we decided on Novell Service Desk,” said Cahoon. “Our team had several meetings to determine our ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ for a ticketing system. Novell Service Desk was the only one to fill all of our ‘needs’ and even our ‘nice to have’ wants in a ticket system. Not only did it do all that, but the price point was great! Installation and integration into our existing Active Directory and Novell ZENworks environments was very easy—we were up and running in no time.”

ITIL support was another attractive feature. “We’re looking to incorporate some ITIL-certified processes for our help desk, and Novell Service Desk will come in handy for that,” said Cahoon. “We’ll be able to easily generate outage tracking and other key reports for auditors.”

Adaris played a key role in the project. “Adaris provided tremendous value,” said Cahoon. “Not only did they help us get the most out of our Novell ZENworks deployment, they helped us get up and running quickly with Novell Service Desk.”

“Support tickets are now managed through Novell Service Desk, providing greater accountability across the support organization,” said Cahoon. “This really helps with speeding call resolution.”

Results

Today, Novell ZENWorks Configuration Management allows NuVista Energy to remotely manage and update its workstations spread across the country. This enables the company to respond to critical needs much faster. “In the past, if one of our field offices needed a critical application, they would have had to ship the workstation to us,” said Cahoon. “Now we can remotely install a new application in minutes.”

The solution has also helped the company avoid significant IT support costs. “We recently patched 175 workstations at once in just an hour, with few issues,” said Cahoon. “Prior to implementing Novell ZENworks, that just wouldn’t have been possible. In fact without it, I would have had to double our staff. We’re also saving thousands of dollars in travel costs.”

NuVista Energy also plans to use the Novell solution to reduce the time and complexity of its Windows 7 migration. “It used to take six hours for a technician to build each new workstation and a lot of user profiles could get lost in the process,” said Cahoon. “With Novell ZENworks, we can handle this in 30 minutes or less, and migrate user profiles to their new workstations.”

Novell Service Desk has also provided significant benefits. “We’ve freed up about one quarter of our IT staff’s time using Novell Service Desk,” said Cahoon. “They’re now able to spend more time focused on meeting the business needs of our users.”

The solution has also helped build cooperation between end users and the IT team. “Novell Service Desk helped improve the perception of IT and let users know what we’re doing to resolve their issues promptly,” said Cahoon.

Headquartered in Redwood City, California and employing over 600 staff across the US and India, they are inspired by the philosophy of making money management easy, intuitive and insightful. Being an organization that provides Software as a Service (SaaS), the need to keep internal infrastructure and staff online is critical, while also effectively managing an influx of change requests from the external customer base. This need resulted in a review of their incumbent service management solution, BMC Remedy, which was found to be at the end of its lifecycle and no longer meeting organizational demands.

“Yodlee needed a structured system that would allow us to meet audit and investigation requirements, but also allow for customized workflows,” said Mr. James Marchetti, Manager for the Business Continuity Program. After researching options, Yodlee selected LiveTime Service Manager for its ease of use for support staff and customers, along with the advanced functionality and embedded Service Level Management.

Installed in the US, LiveTime is used to service Yodlee employees across the US and India, support external customer Change Management through the test, QA and production lifecycle of their SaaS environment, and manage the growing number of change requests logged with the 24×7 command center. Mr. Marchetti reported, “The installation support was great. Any and all problems or questions were addressed quickly and professionally.” He went on to say, “Staff were able to pickup LiveTime with relative ease.”

As the complexity of Yodleeʼs change processes continually increase Mr. Marchetti noted, “LiveTime helps us manage changes with newer and more detailed workflows,” with organizational workflows now mapped directly into LiveTime. “Technicians and Managers can also manage tickets with great flexibility and ease with improved visibility across processes,” said Mr. Marchetti.

Yodleeʼs service and support handles up to 150 requests a week applying the fully configurable Service Level Agreements and built-in reports to monitor technician performance, status, closure and rejection rates. In addition to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of Yodlees support organization, Mr. Marchetti has found communication with customers is much improved as customers now have the ability to check the status of their requests by accessing the Customer Portal included with LiveTime Service Manager.

Headquartered in Paris, Illinois, market leader in innovative lighting North American Lighting (NAL), is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koito Manufacturing Co Ltd in Japan, located across five offices in the US. However, the best automotive lighting assembly plant housing cutting edge manufacturing technologies and processes, found it was being hampered by the lack of process and technology when managing IT service and support.

Ms Judy Nagy, General Manager of IT, described NAL’s support process as, “Being completely manual with customers calling on whomever they thought would be available or who helped the last time.” She said, “This resulted in the squeaky wheel getting the grease and a support environment that experienced constant interruptions due to fire-fighting, making it sporadic and inefficient.” Ms Nagy further explained, “IT response to employee hiring and termination was not timely and was incompletely handled, resulting in security issues, loss of productivity and in some cases loss of equipment.”

Investing in a tool that would streamline support processes, assist with the management of staff workloads and reduce the number of repeat incidents became imperative to improving NAL’s IT service. LiveTime Service Manager was selected based on it’s ease of use, web based architecture and rapid return on investment.

The General Manager of IT reported, “We were able to install the product without any problem and now we have eliminated help desk telephone support.” Ms Nagy went on to say, “We are now serving a broader base of customers more consistently. There are more satisfied customers, although customers who previously received a disproportionate amount of IT support are less satisfied.”

NAL finds that IT project work productivity has increased due to fewer interruptions for operational support. “Technicians are also able to perform root-cause analysis on repeat incidents and deal with the primary cause of the problem rather than the symptoms,” reported the General Manager of IT.

From management’s perspective, Ms Nagy observed an increased ability to track IT technician time and manage staffing levels. She also reported, “Staff are able to manage time more effectively resulting in overall productivity increase.”

Committed to innovation, quality and customer satisfaction the 140 staff, based in Toronto, Montreal and in off-shore centers in India and Romania, work to offer a diverse range of Managed Internet Services, Service Colocation, Web Hosting, VoIP and Long Distance Services, plus Business Process and IT Outsourcing solutions. The broad portfolio of services combined with the customer-centric focus mandate that Pathway continually improve its service offering by monitoring service agreements and streamlining internal and external service delivery processes.

Using email with no ability to track service level agreements and inconsistent workflows to provide support, Pathways wanted to invest in a service management tool to enhance their organization. Mr Jason Oriente, Operations Manager at Pathway Communications said, “The advanced functionality of LiveTime Service Manager was a stand-out option with its customizable interface, reports capability, high return on investment and low ongoing costs.”

Mr Oriente reported that the installation of LiveTime was very easy and they now use Web Services to integrate each customer’s CRM system with the Service Desk for customer information and request updates. Support operations were further improved through monitoring tool integration which open and update incidents in the Help Desk automatically.

“The system is used for internal and external support services by the Help Desk, Provisioning and Accounts, receiving over 700 calls a week,” noted the Operations Manager, after Pathways successfully implemented Incident, Problem and Change Management.

“With LiveTime’s fully configurable Workflows, SLAs and OLAs, Pathway’s support processes have been streamlined,” explained Mr Oriente, “We are now continually meeting and surpassing our service level requirements.”

“The Mean Time and SLA reports have also allowed us to monitor and improve our performance,” said the Operations Manager of Pathway Communications. As the winners of the 2008 Consumers’ Choice Award for Business Excellence as an outstanding Internet Service Provider, and for Customer Satisfaction in Toronto, Ontario, Pathway has taken customer service to a new level with LiveTime.

The eye care industry’s most recommended photochromic lens manufacturer, Transitions Optical, offers more than 100 lens options in the latest materials and designs. Founded in 1990, it now employs over 1,200 people and has established partnerships with more than a dozen lens manufacturers worldwide.

Transitions commitment to promoting healthy sight has helped millions of people enjoy better vision while preserving their sight over their lifetime. This commitment to it’s customers requires Transition employees, who are dispersed around the world, to be fully accessible and operational. Such a requirement demanded that Transitions’ service and support team review their help desk processes, which resulted in the organization adopting ITIL best practices for their Service Management.

Being a global organization that wanted a centralized Service Desk, their existing help desk application, Track-It needed to be replaced. Transitions required the replacement tool to be a fully web-based application, with a single point of administration and accessibility from any browser. It also needed to be ITIL certified for Incident, Configuration and Service Level Management. LiveTime Service Manager was a perfect fit.

LiveTime Service Manager, with its embedded CMDB, provided the service and support team with the ability to maintain a more complete picture of their IT infrastructure. LiveTime’s ITIL certified Incident Management reassured Transitions that they had a tool which would allow them to improve their incident management process.

“We have a global help desk that is a single point of contact for IT issues,” said Mr Michael Salayo, IT Help Desk Analyst. “With LiveTime we can easily manage the incident process where issues that are not resolved by the frontline help desk staff, can be easily escalated to the most relevant IT department with complete visibility of the Configuration Item through the Service Level Agreement.”

Handling approximately 175 calls per week, Mr Salayo reported, “Our service has improved significantly since we adopted LiveTime Service Manager. Working with LiveTime Software, we received professional on-site training and installation. We have even virtualized LiveTime using the company’s new Virtual Appliance.”

The keys to Altis Semiconductor’s success are the objectives of excellence, innovation and strategic partnerships. With a workforce of over 1,200 employees spread over 15 Organizational Units, the need to provide a high availability IT infrastructure and best in class service is essential to achieving continued success.

To meet this requirement, Altis Semiconductor needed real time consolidated CMDB views of their IT infrastructure and Configuration Items (CIs). This provided the foundation for other fully integrated service management processes, including Incident, Problem, Change and Knowledge Management.

A crucial element in this project was the ability to leverage existing infrastructure, including Novell NDS/eDirectory, LANDesk, OCS Inventory and Nagios via a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Working with these specifications Altis Semiconductor selected LiveTime Service Manager based on its out-of-the-box third party integration functionality, extensive Web Services API, internationalization and reporting capabilities.

“Using web service injectors from LANDesk, OCS Inventory and numerous local databases into LiveTime’s embedded CMDB, Altis’ IT environment was successfully mapped within LiveTime,” reported the Information Systems Operations Manager, Pascal Martinez. “Over 9000 CIs are now maintained automatically within LiveTime’s Federated Configuration Management System (CMS).”

Impressed with the service and support offered during the LiveTime implementation Mr Martinez said, “The first phase project to integrate LiveTime was really a great success”. “LiveTime has enabled Altis to adopt ITIL 3 best practices across the organization, giving our more than 90 technicians full process visibility as well build and leverage existing knowledge.”

Mr Martinez also informed LiveTime, “Working with Incident Management and creating over one hundred requests per day, we now have the ability to build a dynamic knowledge base and apply 16 different SLAs to a single workflow to ensure individual customer expectations are met.”