Streamlining Processes and Unifying Departments through ITSM

Samanage is now SolarWinds^® Service Desk.

Challenges

With a number of different products in use, the technology team at The BLOC sought an asset management solution with contract and license management built-in. A ticketing system was not on their radar yet, as they needed to automate their inventory, including asset allocation.

“We were looking for a very cohesive system,” said Gilad Vinitsky, Chief Technology Officer at The BLOC. “We needed a system to meet our requirements as far as maintaining a hardware inventory, software inventory, and contract management.”

The BLOC was not using a solution for incident management, or building any sort of formal processes for regularly occurring tasks. They were also spending time solving and responding to repetitive tickets, with no knowledge base to assist.

“When I began to take a look at it, we were doing certain processes manually, kind of off-handed and piecemealed,” Vinitsky recalled.

Samanage filled a need for IT inventory management, and fit within the budget, so that was easy to identify. But, some of the larger solutions were still on the way. He didn’t know it at the time, but Vinitsky was bringing enterprise service management to his entire organization.

Solution

“We bought into the ticketing aspect,” Vinitsky said. “After that, I started developing the (employee) onboarding process with other departments. The workflow management is just an amazing aspect of this system.”

Up to that point, different departments were using different systems for internal processes. Approvals moved slowly across different platforms. Managers juggled communication through emails, meetings, and work forms.

In addition to simplified employee onboarding across departments, The BLOC also found service success in purchase approvals or submitting mobile expenses. Suddenly, the workflow was much more efficient for the finance team.

Vinitsky shut down an intranet that was difficult to maintain, and replaced it with features built into Samanage.

“We didn’t want a separate knowledge base,” Vinitsky said. “We regularly use solutions when we have tickets, and often enough they’re repetitive, so it’s such a time saving thing to just insert a solution rather than to type out a response. It just saves us a lot of time.”

Vinitsky and his team quickly realized that through Samanage they could simplify tasks through straightforward and visual concepts and process. Through workflows they were able to instantly update their internal the logic and start operating under the mindset of “the simpler the better.”

Benefits

With Samanage fully implemented, the solution because the perfect tool for the full execution of enterprise service management. Sure, Vinitsky chose a solution that handled his needs in IT, but why stop there? The platform had tangible impacts for team members across multiple departments.

“Our HR person now initiates the new employee process and it saves her a lot of time because she would have to do it in six or seven systems,” Vinitsky said. “Now she basically creates an incident which delegates everything, including tasking things that she needs to do herself.”

He added that purchase approvals, expense reports, or mobile expenses have become much easier with simplified processes.

“It’s a very streamlined process where they attach two things, they fill out a quick form, and it goes through an approval process,” Vinitsky said. “I get it. I approve it. Finance automatically gets it, and they have searchability, access to what’s completed, and they have everything organized very well as far as getting those expenses. So that’s one workflow that’s working very well.”

If the IT department can benefit from streamlined processes, so can HR, finance, and departments throughout the organization. The BLOC caught on very quickly.

“Samanage is acting as a multiple solution platform for us. We’ve gone from six different platforms to one,” Vinitsky said. “It brings our departments much closer together. If someone is out of the office and a task needs to get done, we now have some visibility into how to proceed.”

What started as a simple IT solution became a Swiss Army Knife for the entire organization.

“We’re using it as a complete service desk solution. Obviously, it’s been a great fit.”