SysAid has provided a uniform platform for the staff to open up tickets and for the IT team to easily look at them, act on them, and help staff members resolve their issues. It sped up our time and helped us triage and coordinate our time on all the different IT issues that might be going on at the company.

When we have a new member of our IT organization, SysAid has had a good impact for us because we are able to spend minimal time training that person on the system. It's very easy to add somebody on the administration side and to set them up so that they have the access and groups that they need. The amount of work there is very minimal. I don't have to spend a lot of time doing that. And once they are part of our organization and are exposed to the tool, the time needed to pick it up and start working in the tool, in all aspects, is very minimal, which is good. That's a big plus for this tool.

Also, the reporting automation is definitely a time-saver because I can set things to run and then I don't have to worry about them unless I need to change a parameter of a report.

One of the things we're looking at, which I believe will save us time, is the task feature. With it we can generate tasks off one master ticket and that will be automated so it will save time and the effort of having to make sure that all the right areas within our organization are aware of a particular ticket and that they do the tasks they need to do. That automation is definitely a time-saver.

Another feature we use when we're loading our inventory into our CMDB — it's not really automation — is the fact that you can load mass lists of inventory at one time. You don't have to generate single records and that is a time saver. 

Within our system we have a series of notifications and email rules which would be considered automation within the system. We're able to keep our master ticket queue, where everything comes in, clean. Depending on certain types that come in, we don't necessarily need to look at them, or we can route them directly to a given area without intervention. We do save time with that as well.

It depends on what we are working on, but overall, SysAid saves us one to two hours a week.

In terms of having to hire extra people, it hasn't saved me there, but it has allowed me to free up my techs' time to be able to focus on other things. So in a roundabout way, it has had some impact on headcount because they're able to concentrate on other activities rather than spending time doing tasks that are not automated.

Another part of the cost savings for us is that I don't have to consume part of a resource, outside of myself, to do the administration of the tool. It is very intuitive. They do provide you Professional Services to teach you and get you up to speed, but once you have all that, the administration is not a big ask on my time. The flexibility to be able to change things and do things, from my end, in a quick manner, is a cost savings. Overall the administrative side does save you costs in terms of resources and time. And the fact that you don't have to buy other tools to supplement what you may want to do — you don't have to buy a new Knowledge Base because that's in there already — is definitely a cost savings from an IT perspective.

All of our calls for everything used to route through our customer service team or our customer service desk then they would pass them out. We have many teams who passed IT tickets to IT and network tickets to networks and camera stuff to our camera team. Now, that's all automated. We're going to grow our business quite a lot over the next few years. We want to have that automation in place to allow us to grow and to take on lots of new stuff.

The systems automation capabilities definitely save us time. We've been automating links between different applications. We have a different system that runs a lot of our mechanical-electrical engineering jobs in the background. And we link that to SysAid via the API that they provide to interact. It is like data between systems, rather than it being manually copied and pasted or emailed around. 

It saves days of people's time. On a monthly basis, we definitely save a whole day of people's time. I'd say, three to four days a month minimum of someone's time, maybe more. It's a big improvement. Automation didn't save us headcounts. We haven't made anybody redundant or anything because of it. But it will allow us to grow without having to take on additional headcount, which is part of the point of it, so people are able to focus on more important tasks. A lot of service desk tasks can be pretty repetitive and pretty boring and this will take a lot of that away from them.

The automation capabilities have allowed us to free up time to do other things. There's no monetary value associated with it.

We are using SysAid in information technology (IT). That was what we originally started using it to do: incident requests, changes, and problems. Then, people loved SysAid so much that other support departments, like human resources, finance, and our facilities department came to us, and said, "Could we also use the same SysAid platform for all the staffing in our agency who are looking for support since everybody likes the user interface?" Also, if they're asking for support around IT issues, they could theoretically ask for support around HR, finance, facilities, etc. Over the last three or four years, we expanded the use of SysAid so it's not just used for IT. It is used by any support department who provides support to the rest of the agency. E.g., our facilities management team loves it. The solution allows them to do analytics if they have a problem with a piece of equipment.

For the end user, they don't have to deal with going through multiple systems for support. They go to one system for support instead. The benefit for end users is that it's very convenient. They use the SysAid Self-Service Portal which allows them to pick different categories of requests for support, incidents, requests, etc. Then, we use the SysAid workflow engine, based on the categorization of the issue, to automatically route an issue to a particular user. If it is a payroll related issue, then it will go directly to the payroll team. If it is a HR related issue, it will go to HR team. If it is an IP related issue, then it will go to the IT team, and so on. 

All our service management is integrated into one system. Our response time is much faster because we have a visual into what is going on.

Using the workflow engine in SysAid, we can automatically route incidents to the respective support teams. E.g., if support needs helps with escalating an issue because certain SLAs are not being met, all of that is very easy to manage. It makes the process very transparent, both for the person who is asking for support and also the person who is providing the support, because we can then see who is currently working on helping to resolve the issue and how long it takes for them to respond and resolve that issue. Therefore, it gives us a much better overall picture of governance, improving our ability to provide support to our staff.

In terms of resolution, we use a metric called First Call Resolution. E.g., if a person reached out to us for help, were we able to resolve that issue without having to go through an escalation process? Going through a Level 1 to Level 2 support on through that route, we have resolved about 85 percent of our issues within the first contact. That's a pretty good metric for us. Because 85 out of a 100 times, we are able to resolve the issue at the level that the issue was routed because not all issues are routed only to Level 1. There are some issues that could get directly routed to Level 2 depending on the category. Without having to go through multiple levels, we are able to resolve 85 percent of those incidents at the level which the ticket was generated. We manage those kinds of metrics, but those are not really put into some of the other support areas.

Metrics for response and resolution times are different depending on whether the issue is somebody from the service desk trying to help a person on the phone remotely versus our desktop team who travel sometimes to locations. Overall, our response time metrics typically depend on the priority of the issue. For example, with a Priority 1 issue, we respond in less than 15 minutes. For a Priority 4 issue, our response time could be as long as four hours. Usually between the P1 and P4 issues, the average response time for us is anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes no matter what the priority of the incentives. We are pretty quick with at least acknowledging the fact that we've received your issue. We will work on it and get back to you or resolve it and get back to you. We do pretty good in terms of responsiveness.

It improves IT with its tickets. The IT team became more efficient at how we respond to the needs of clientele. With the last ticket that was created, we previously had no way to track responses. Now, if there is a same-day activity assigned to an engineer, then the engineer has 24 hours to resolve the ticket. Because of SysAid, the responsibility is placed on the administrator who keeps track of the customer incident. It also helps with putting the onus on the engineer to actually close the ticket. Because if an engineer has a ticket that is overdue, it's assigned a flag and escalated. Once it's escalated in the system, it goes up to Tier 2. With Tier 2, we have to know why it was escalated. The engineer would need to have a good reason why it wasn't resolved or it had to be escalated. Therefore, it increases the efficiency of technicians and departments. Because it's in the system, managers may generate potential solutions too.

It tracks everything that the technicians are doing. We can account for time and manage resources.

After we introduced SysAid, especially in the back office team in IT where we started with it, we had the option to report the workload of the team. We increased the team afterward because we could see and prove the workload of every single member. Additionally, we implemented SLAs. It's open to everyone. When you request or send a request and we have an SLA based on it, then we can see the status of the ticket, who's working on it, how it is against the SLA, if we are within the SLAs, or if we are above the SLAs. That's from an end-user point of view. 

Additionally, the admin point of view or my point of view is with the reporting function to see where we have SLAs and to see if they are or aren't working and where we need to improve. We can see who is taking the most time to close a ticket and if we then need training improvement. 

The automation capabilities save us time. Before, whenever we had to set up any database systems, any new clients, or any new suppliers we work with, we got an email. Everything was typed manually from the requesting user. Everything had to be then done by copy and paste into the right systems and then write back that it's done or that it's not done. Now, with automation, an end-user is created as a new lead in the CRM. This gets automated into the database and creates a ticket in the system so that we can check or double-check. That's it. That saves quite a lot of time and is a resource system.

On a weekly basis, we save between five and eight hours per team. We need to get more done with what we are working on together with the SysAid implementation team. This will then save even more time.

SysAid provides a unified queue to manage everything of IT service desk, such as all incidents, requests, changes, problems, projects. Not only does each IT staff explicitly conduct the assigned tasks to themselves, but the whole team have a better understanding of how to collaborate. It is very easy to prioritise different events or requests and make us deal with our daily job more efficiently. The system has improved our average resolving time for our customers.

It's supporting the daily routine of the IT organization, it is the ticketing system. It's very helpful due to the fact that it provides us with full evidence and full transparency for what we are working on. In that sense, it's improved our organization.