Manufacturing

How ADC’s Strategic Technology Partner, MKS, Helped a Steel Company’s IT Group Solve a Critical Business Issue
A southeastern US steel company’s IT group, with no formal Help Desk and a maintenance contract about to expire, was facing a rather sizeable dilemma. Certain requirements were simply not being supported by their existing software change management solution, Softlanding TurnOver™, and the company was in need of a low-maintenance, customizable solution designed to address the issue.

A robust and responsive Help Desk solution needed
In order to improve visibility into the status of change requests, the team was looking for a formal Help Desk solution that could be used across all development environments. The Help Desk would be accessible to developers across all company groups and would deliver complete visibility from incidents through to change requests and application development. The ideal solution would allow developers to work concurrently on large-scale projects and emergency fixes, offering faster andexpanded service to meet customer expectations established in Service Level Agreements (SLA). The solution also needed to be user friendly, providing a single interface for customers to enter Help Desk Tickets.

In line with their main objectives of increased visibility and heightened levels of customer service, the company also sought a solution that would effectively keep developers more focused on development tasks and less on administrative duties, based on the reasoning that efficiency would increase if the developers did not have to constantly enter the system to view tickets. They also hoped to resolve some auditing issues with respect to recovery and traceability, while being able to provide management with a quick and easy status update of where things stood at any given point in time.

A collaboration with MKS
A small group of the company’s personnel worked to familiarize themselves with the project requirements well in advance of initial meetings with outside vendors, and this proved to be crucial when it came to implementing the new solution within their three-week deadline. Already having a sound idea of the requirements for their new Help Desk solution, the project team worked alongside a team of MKS consultants, converting vision to reality and implementing a solution that addressed the challenges being faced.

The Help Desk Ticket was designed as a single screen to include:

• mandatory fields, with an automatic error message to be triggered when a user tried to submit a request with information missing from mandatory fields, along with event triggers to auto-populate non-mandatory fields upon submission of a request
• unique cascading pick lists in a three part category field, categorizing issues extensively so that the correct technical group could be assigned to deal with the change request
• the option to include a screen shot (or other attachments) as part of a change request in order to clear up any confusion that could result from ambiguous information being provided

Change requests at the company are now “batched” or grouped together as either “enhancements” or larger scale projects, with simple event triggers enabling automatic email notification for all stakeholders when status updates are made on certain issue types. The enforced workflow facilitates visibility of processes from start to finish, validating workflow by requiring an electronic signature to approve the movement of a ticket from one stage to another, while user-friendly charts offer valuable metrics to quickly analyze where IT is spending the majority of their time.

The MKS difference
The company ultimately decided to go with ADC’s strategic technology partner MKS over the competition because MKS Integrity could accommodate its requirement of allowing development to be able to have two models within CA2E, and MKS automatically keeps those models in synch with each other. Just three weeks after an initial onsite visit from MKS’s team of consultants, the company had successfully implemented MKS Integrity as their solution of choice, with positive results expected soon thereafter. It is MKS Integrity’s unsurpassed flexibility that has enabled the company to implement a solution that addresses their unique requirements.

A successful implementation
The ability to group change requests appropriately is facilitating concurrent work across multiple projects, allowing developers to respond to emergency fixes while larger scale project development is ongoing; mandatory fields are helping to increase efficiency in responding to Help Desk Tickets, since the necessary information is being captured at the time of original entry; and effective documentation of past ticket issues is allowing for more efficient resolution of future change requests, providing a more focused starting point for solving new but similar issues.

Moreover, automatic and comprehensive email notification is keeping developers more or less out of the Help Desk system when dealing with change requests, while improving overall visibility across all relevant parties. The end-user community has found the new Help Desk system more “straightforward and easy to use.” And finally, management is now able to quickly and easily access metrics to gain an instant snapshot of progress, and history tracking is improving overall workflow traceability, impressing internal users and external auditors alike.