director of information technology,
Morgan-Keller Construction
ServiceDesk Plus, Endpoint Central, ADManager Plus
Established in 1955, Morgan-Keller Construction is a privately held general contracting and construction management company located in Frederick, Maryland. The company has built numerous multi-family and senior-living communities, educational facilities, offices, hospitals and healthcare facilities, financial institutions, fire stations, and retail and industrial facilities across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.
"Using Analytics Plus, we're able to demonstrate the value an in-house IT department brings to the company."
Morgan-Keller Construction's IT department supports roughly 400 employees. Half of these employees work out of the corporate office in Frederick, Maryland and take care of planning, scheduling, budgeting, and marketing the company's construction services, while the other half work out of ongoing construction sites and oversee construction activities and contractors. Supporting such a hybrid, dynamic workforce calls for an equally flexible, transparent, and, most importantly, highly integrated suite of IT applications that can help the IT team manage the company's IT environment.
Joshua Brechbuehl, director of information technology at Morgan-Keller, was already familiar with ManageEngine's suite of IT applications as he had used several ManageEngine applications at his previous company. So he introduced Morgan-Keller to ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to manage the incoming request queue. Soon, Morgan-Keller started using ManageEngine Endpoint Central to manage its computers, ADManager Plus to manage Active Directory objects, and Analytics Plus, ManageEngine's IT analytics solution, to analyze data from all the above ManageEngine applications.
The IT department at Morgan-Keller, led by Brechbuehl, wanted an IT analytics solution to graphically demonstrate to senior management the workload handled by the IT team, the value that they add to the organization by ensuring that IT assets are operating smoothly, and the continuous improvement of IT service quality. For this, Brechbuehl needed a flexible analytics solution that could bring in data from all of Morgan-Keller's IT applications and enable his team to create unified reports effortlessly.
Brechbuehl said, "We wanted compelling visuals to support the need for our staffing and budgeting. We wanted to demonstrate to our senior management that our help desk efficiently supports service requests and incidents from various departments within SLAs. In fact, we wanted to prove to them that our in-house IT team is doing a top-notch job as compared to any managed service provider."
"Initially, we chose Analytics Plus because we already had several other ManageEngine solutions, so we didn't look at any other analytics platform. But the turnkey ability of Analytics Plus to integrate with any application and get instant reports really won us over. Within just one hour of installation, we had a full-fledged reporting system, all set and ready for use," said Brechbuehl.
Morgan-Keller chose Analytics Plus because of its ability to integrate seamlessly with other ManageEngine applications such as Endpoint Central and ServiceDesk Plus, as well as its ability to bring in data from local or in-house data centers.
With Analytics Plus, Morgan-Keller can now track critical metrics related to help desk performance, staff performance, SLAs, customer satisfaction, endpoint security, and planning and budgeting. This helps the company identify underlying issues, dig deeper to find their root cause, and take remedial measures to fix them. Brechbuehl illustrated, "We track tickets by categories such as hardware and software tickets. Then, we break this down to subcategories such as MS Office, ERP solution, networking, or VPN-related tickets. Such granular visibility enables us to see where we spend the most time, and analyze how we can improve those software services to minimize the tickets from these subcategories."
When it's time to plan the yearly budget, Analytics Plus helps Brechbuehl and team demonstrate the value they add to the organization.
Brechbuehl said, "While planning our yearly budgets, we show the leadership team the exceptional service provided by the in-house IT team in full-colored, easily decipherable visuals using Analytics Plus reports. This helps them understand how the IT team spends their time supporting tickets from the different departments within Morgan-Keller, and the resolution time that these end users are getting. This helps us easily get the 'go-ahead' for our staffing or training plans."
Morgan-Keller was supporting a hybrid group of workers even before the COVID-19 outbreak, with half the workers in the field and the other half in the office. So when the pandemic forced everyone to work from their homes, Morgan-Keller's IT team looked to their IT data to understand how to shuffle IT staff to ensure around-the-clock services. They found that nearly 80% of their support tickets could be resolved remotely and only the remaining 20% of tickets required in-house IT support.
Brechbuehl explained, "Our data revealed that only one out of every five IT tickets needed in-house staff to resolve the ticket. So, when the entire organization worked remotely, we managed our IT support team with just one person working from the office. This greatly helped our ability to socially distance ourselves and keep everybody healthy."
Speaking on Analytics Plus' technical support, Brechbuehl said, "Analytics Plus' technical support team is always impressive, responsive, and helps us find resolution quickly. The best part is that they're always ready to help us create custom reports for our IT data."
Analytics Plus is a business intelligence and IT analytics tool that enables organizations to visualize their IT data from several IT applications and monitoring tools. With the combined capabilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, Analytics Plus' AI assistant Zia responds to voice and text-based questions with rich visualizations that drastically reduce report building time and enable organizations to make faster, data-driven decisions. Additionally, Analytics Plus offers predictive analytical capabilities, contextual collaboration, and real-time data alerts based on threshold violations.
