About the company
A leading powder coating producer based in Switzerland, IGP Powder Coatings boasts a global presence in providing high-quality coating solutions for surface applications in the architecture, building, and transport industries. The versatility, durability, and sustainability of IGP solutions have made it a pioneer in the powder coatings industry since 1968.
IGP operates three state-of-the-art production facilities in Switzerland, Poland, and the United States and has a presence worldwide through multiple subsidiaries and distribution partners.
The need to transition from legacy systems
As IGP's business thrived and technology evolved, so did its IT support needs, putting the organization on the hunt for a robust IT service management solution. IGP soon realized the pressing need for a comprehensive ITSM tool that could optimize its workflows, enhance collaboration, and ultimately provide better support experiences.
Before transitioning to ServiceDesk Plus, IGP's infrastructure team, which handled both server and client infrastructure, relied on a shared mailbox system rather than a dedicated help desk tool. While this approach seemed to work when the company was still in its early stages, as operations expanded, relying solely on manual processes became unsustainable. A shared mailbox also led to an increased risk of crucial tickets being missed in the high volume of emails. The lack of a modern ITSM solution and associated automation capabilities necessary for smooth-running IT support operations posed a web of challenges.
The challenges explained
These are the challenges that led IGP to do away with its shared mailbox approach and transition to an ITSM tool:
- Customization: Without a centralized help desk solution, customization options were limited, making it difficult for the company to tailor its workflows to meet specific needs.
- Ticket assignment and tracking: The absence of automated ticket assignment and tracking mechanisms meant that requests could easily get overlooked, leading to delays and inefficiencies.
- Communication and status updates: Without automated notifications, staying updated on the status of tickets and communicating these updates required significant manual effort.
- Reporting: The lack of robust reporting capabilities hindered the company's ability to analyze trends, identify areas for improvement, and be aware of how its service delivery processes were holding up. Since the IT support team managed a vast number of support tickets across various locations, without detailed reports, the company also lacked visibility into its resource allocation and cost control.
Finding the perfect fit: How did IGP's infrastructure team zero in on ServiceDesk Plus?
The software team at IGP was already reaping the benefits of ServiceDesk Plus, the unified service management platform from ManageEngine. This in-house endorsement meant that the infrastructure team was eager to head in the same direction.
With both the server and software teams utilizing the same platform, seamless ticket hand off between them was finally possible. ServiceDesk Plus's centralized repository for storing data on the software team's IT tickets provided crucial context and insights into ongoing issues, facilitating a more holistic approach to problem-solving. This helped foster better collaboration and streamline IT support.
ServiceDesk Plus meets primary requirements through its customization and automation capabilities
From standardizing its request fulfillment processes to establishing proper control over its IT infrastructure, here's how IGP leveraged ServiceDesk Plus to optimize its IT support processes.
Standardizing employee request fulfillment across its workforce
With a workforce of around 600 employees across three production facilities and 21 locations worldwide, managing employee onboarding, leaves, and other employee-related requests often involved multiple steps. To simplify this process, the IT team wanted to make it easy for employees to locate and initiate requests from a central console.
Using ServiceDesk Plus, the team built a comprehensive service catalog to showcase the services available to employees, making it similar to an online shopping experience. The team set up its service catalog around the purpose-built templates that came out of the box and also built custom templates to suit IGP employees' specific needs.
Form Rules helped the team perform no-code, form-based automations on the request templates it customized. With pre-populated and dynamic fields, employees were able to submit concise and accurate requests, reducing back-and-forth communication with the IT team.
By providing its end users with role-based and site-based access to the templates, the team also managed to avoid misguided requests by hiding irrelevant templates.
Setting the right expectations and keeping relevant stakeholders in the loop
The company benefited from the tool's robust SLA management capabilities. The infrastructure team set up automatic assignment of SLAs based on ticket parameters to ensure proper prioritization and was able to establish different SLA tiers based on priority, ensuring critical issues received faster resolution times.
The team also set up escalation rules for both its response and resolution times to automatically notify technicians and managers when SLAs neared violation. This enabled proactive intervention and prevented missed deadlines. With customized notification templates, stakeholders also received targeted notifications based on their roles. For example, managers were notified of approaching SLA breaches, while end users were updated on the progress of their tickets.
Discovering IT assets across the vast network
Prior to leveraging the asset discovery capabilities in ServiceDesk Plus, the IT team was using Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (formerly SCCM) to manage its endpoints. Due to frequent bugs and inconsistencies, there was incomplete asset data, hampering the team's ability to manage resources effectively. But, thanks to the asset management capabilities of ServiceDesk Plus in combination with Endpoint Central, ManageEngine's UEM solution, the team was able to gain a holistic understanding of its IT assets through comprehensive asset discovery.
Leveraging reports and dashboards to optimize global support
As a multinational company with subsidiaries distributed across the globe, IGP's IT support team provides technical assistance across different locations. This called for the need to manage ticket volume, technician workload, and associated costs efficiently.
Using the powerful reporting capabilities of ServiceDesk Plus, the IT team was able to gain greater control and visibility into its global support operations.
- Tickets per company reports provided insights into support volume across different subsidiaries, allowing the company to identify trends, allocate resources effectively, and tailor service offerings to specific regional needs.
- Time spent on tickets reports offered valuable insights into technician workload, allowing the team to identify areas for improvement, optimize team workflows, and ensure efficient support delivery.
- Also, by setting an individual Cost per Hour for each technician, the company could generate reports for accurate cost allocation, enabling it to charge subsidiaries based on the actual support resources utilized.
To get complete visibility into its service desk's operations, the IT team leveraged the interactive dashboards in ServiceDesk Plus. It created different dashboards with both built-in widgets as well as custom widgets that displayed data from the reports it generated. Providing role-based access permissions to these dashboards ensured that only specific stakeholders were able to view them, preserving the data integrity of IGP's service desk.
Unlocking efficiency with ServiceDesk Plus and ManageEngine
With ServiceDesk Plus, IGP found an intuitive and user-friendly solution that fit the company's unique requirements and helped it take control of its IT. By combining the customization and automation capabilities of the platform, the company was able to bolster its service operations while also optimizing IT costs. It has also benefited from ManageEngine's vast ecosystem of IT management solutions, including OpManager, ADAudit Plus, ADSelfService Plus, and EventLog Analyzer.
IGP continues to explore the full potential of ServiceDesk Plus, uncovering new functionalities to further optimize its IT support processes.