technical services coordinator at Vizstone
ServiceDesk Plus MSP, OpManager, data from local databases
Vizstone is an information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider based in Perth, Western Australia. Vizstone offers a wide range of enterprise IT solutions to deploy and maintain IT infrastructures, as well as solutions for data analytics, data visualization, and managed IT services. Vizstone has a huge customer base in the Asia-Pacific region, and serves companies of various sizes, ranging from 5-1000 employees.
"Analytics Plus makes it easy for us to create reports and dashboards-it's a lot better than pulling data and creating reports manually. And, it allows us to visualize data so beautifully that our clients love it,"
As a managed services provider, Vizstone is bound by contract to maintain detailed records of client accounts and provide clients a monthly, quarterly, and yearly account overview. These records must include information such as the number of tickets closed, SLA resolution rates, the number of alarms, a summary of changes implemented, and more. At the same time, they have to provide internal users (management teams, executives, and service engineers) a complete overview of multiple client accounts so they can calculate costs, allocate resources, and streamline workflow.
Vizstone has about 130 clients, and each client has a different set of reporting requirements; this requires Vizstone to collect account information from multiple tools such as ServiceDesk Plus MSP, OpManager, and a few in-house databases to run reports. To handle such huge volumes of data, Vizstone was looking for a powerful analytics solution that could handle multiple client accounts, offer customized reports and dashboards, and provide secure access to clients as well as internal teams.
According to Joshua, the primary reason Vizstone chose Analytics Plus was the ability to create a variety of reports and dashboards.
Joshua said, "Previously, we were working with standard reports from ServiceDesk Plus that did not meet our client's specifications. So, we had to piece together different reports in a Microsoft Word document and present it to clients. But with Analytics Plus, we can easily create personalized dashboards to provide clients a complete picture of their accounts."
Some other reasons Vizstone opted for Analytics Plus was easy integration with other ManageEngine applications, simple installation, customizations offered, and security. Joshua also added, "Analytics Plus doesn't require much maintenance from us, except for the initial set-up."
With Analytics Plus, Vizstone was able to set up a centralized analytics ecosystem to address the data needs of both their customers and internal users. Now they can provide customers a monthly, quarterly, or yearly summary of changes implemented, tickets resolved, tickets pending, technician time spent, and labor costs. They can also provide critical information to internal teams such as the number of tickets that come in each day, SLA compliance, alarm trends, faulty hardware, and alarm count.
Vizstone also indicated that Analytics Plus' customizations help them sign on new clients. Joshua said, "We set up separate databases for each client. So, if a client needs detailed reports on specific KPIs, we can visually present that data as reports or dashboards. And, if a client wants to visualize data differently (as widgets, charts, pivot tables, or line graphs) we can tailor reports based on their specifications. This helped us sign a few new clients."
Citing an example, Joshua added, "One of our customers wanted to see a report based on priority, response time, and the percentage of requests responded within the target response time. Analytics Plus helped us build this custom report in minutes, which if done manually, would've taken hours."
Internally, Analytics Plus helped Vizstone improve customer service by streamlining workflow and prioritizing tickets in the ticket queue so technicians know which ones to respond to firstt. Pulling in real-time data from ServiceDesk Plus MSP, they set up a live feed for service engineers to track tickets by SLA, priority, or VIP user status, and attend to tickets that were due that day. Joshua explained, "We have so many tickets coming in that sometimes technicians get caught up with new tickets, and forget to look at tickets that are due today. Analytics Plus gives us better sense of when tickets need to be addressed, and has helped us increase our SLAs compliance by 70 percent."
When asked about the Analytics Plus team Joshua said, "[The] Analytics Plus support team is extremely helpful, and respond within a day. In the past, I've asked for their help to build a few custom formulas and got it ready within a week."
Analytics Plus is a business intelligence tool that lets you visualize your data as colorful charts, reports, and dashboards. Source the data you need from spreadsheets, multiple databases (local and cloud), and HTML content from websites; run reports instantly; and securely share your findings with your team to reach consensus about major decisions and everyday operations. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop report builder, Analytics Plus aims to cut down the hassle involved in analyzing organizational data with a user-friendly interface.
