EnterpriseWizard Case Studies

EnterpriseWizard Case Studies - Hopkins County Board of Education

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Hopkins County Board of Education

Technology Department

“We put it into full production use in 2 weeks, it paid for itself immediately and our users are delighted. The team at SupportWizard are very supportive and the product is rock solid.”

Shari Winstead. IT Director, Hopkins County Board of Education

The technology department support team of the Hopkins County Board of Education in Kentucky provides technical assistance for all teachers and technology coordinators and supports over 2250 computers in 14 schools in the district.  

The team at the HCBOE needed a helpdesk system to track and manage issues, route them to the appropriate individuals or teams, coordinate their resolution, inform the schools of their status and monitor activity to ensure that nothing was falling through the cracks. In brief, they needed to operate with the efficiency of a well-managed business and to do so on a limited budget.

HCBOE had tried to satisfy these needs using a well-known helpdesk product but were impeded by its licensing policies, client-server background and unsatisfactory web interface. Only selected workstations could submit work requests, and functionality shortcomings meant that these had to be assigned and routed manually.

The experience with the existing helpdesk product naturally made the HCBOE team cautious about spending more money on this technology. They reviewed over a dozen helpdesk products before narrowing down to a shortlist of three.

SupportWizard was not the cheapest solution, but it won the selection by virtue of its reputation, functionality and unconditional guarantee – HCBOE was given a free two-month evaluation license for an unlimited number of users. If the software did not meet all their needs, they could cancel the purchase decision without any pre-payment or penalty.

The customization/setup requirements included creation of custom tables and fields, integration with Microsoft Active directory, custom escalation rules, automated reports, custom scripts for automated issue assignment, custom groups for access control, work-order routing and GUI customizations.

In addition to tailoring the system to the precise needs of the school district the implementation plan included testing a few schools before rolling the system out to all the schools in the district.

An aggressive one-month schedule was allocated for the customization and rollout period, but even this estimate proved to be pessimistic. The entire process was finished and the system certified for full production use after just two weeks. The benefits were felt immediately.

Results

Response times halved

Now work orders are completed, on average, in less than half the previous time because they are assigned automatically and technicians are immediately notified, rather than waiting for tickets to be manually assigned to them.

Technicians are able to modify or close work orders from anywhere on the network.  This also means they are able to receive new work orders without returning to the central office.

Technicians now devote their time to solving problems rather than answering questions from users about progress on their tickets, because users are notified of status updates automatically and are able to track and update issues through their browsers.

The reduction in response time and improved productivity resulted in a dramatic cut in the number of outstanding work orders. Before SupportWizard was introduced, there were an average of 50 open work orders at any one time. After six weeks, the average had dropped to just 4.

The productivity of users at the individual schools has increased because their problems are getting resolved so much faster.

Technicians used to resolve an average of 18 issues per week, now they resolve 23.

The tech managers used to spend a significant portion of the workday manually assigning issues, now issues are automatically assigned to the appropriate technician and email notifications are sent to all applicable parties.

As detailed below, security has improved and administration costs have been reduced.

These gains were all achieved within 2 months of installation and there are more benefits to come. The software supports custom tables, making it extensible to additional needs in the organization, and these are already under active evaluation.

Work orders are tracked automatically and monitored by the escalation rules. The work done on each order is captured and shown in progress reports that are automatically generated. These reports also document overall performance levels to help management stay on top of things.

Now any authorized individual may submit a work order from any workstation on the network using a browser interface at any time of day or night, rather than having to rely on HCBOE staff to submit the order on their behalf.

All workstation clients use the same Active Directory Service for authentication of their workstation login and SupportWizard login. This improves security, reduces confusion and streamlines/centralizes administration to reduce administrative costs.

The school district has obtained a full ROI on the cost of the software before actually having to pay for it. Response times have been halved, the incident queue has dropped from 50 to 4, user satisfaction improved and personnel costs reduced.

These benefits are the direct result of a disciplined procurement process, selection of appropriate software for the task and a structured implementation. How many private businesses are managed this efficiently?