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sector

sector
LOCAL
LOCALGOVERNMENT
GOVERNMENT
Customer Experience

West Lothian Council


®

Resource Management in
West Lothian Council (WLC), which recently won the prestigious title of UK Council of
the year, has been using assyst as its preferred IT Service Management solution since
1999. The IT team look after just under 10,000 end users in over 500 different locations
throughout the council area, logging several thousand events every month.

“assyst is a very
The requirement
flexible solution.
All incidents and changes are logged in assyst either by WLC’s It allows us to
Service Desk or directly by the end user via assystNET, the web constantly improve
user self-service solution from Axios Systems. However, the tools and expand our
available to assist in job allocation did not allow the available customer service.”
Desktop resource to be fully optimized. Jobs could only be Bob Sim, Service Desk
allocated to the next available analyst, which made planning Team Leader

into the future near impossible. Resource redundancies were


also not visible and it was increasingly difficult to respond to
emergencies. In order to eradicate these inefficiencies and realize
cost reduction potentials WLC wanted to integrate the resource
planning into the Incident Management process.

The solution
It was an obvious choice for WLC to manage their resources in
assyst. The customization of the assyst application took only
a couple of days from design to implementation to capture the
additional information required. In essence, two fields were added
to the Incident logging screen: ‘Scheduled Date’ and ‘Estimated
Time’. This data now provides the basis for continuously updated
Resource Allocation Reports.

over - the process

www.axiossystems.com
Customer Experience
The process
A customer call is received and logged in assyst. The scheduler then completes the
Insight
‘Scheduled Date’ field, taking into account the Service Level Agreement (SLA), the
location and the workload of the available analysts, as well as the ‘Estimated Time’
field, i.e. the length of time the job will take to complete. The Resource Allocation
Report is updated on demand and now provides accurate
information for the allocation of the next job. assyst is
queried once an hour for new incident allocations and
automatically e-mails the affected customer confirming
the date and duration of the work being carried out.
1 Reports issue

It is planned to bring the task of job scheduling into


the Service Desk soon, which means the customer will
Customer First Line
instantly receive a scheduled date for the event he
has just logged.
Excerpt from
Resource
Allocation 2 Log in assyst
Report
5 Sends
5.00 confirmation ®

“When the system went Analyst 1


Analyst 2
of date
& duration
3.00 4.00
live, the increase of
1.50
Analyst 3
incident
2.50 Analyst 4 4 Updates
productivity over the
Analyst 5
1.00
4.50 5.00 Scheduler
first couple of weeks 3.00
2.50

was very impressive.


e

u
ed

y)
Tu

Th

da
W

(to

A fantastic result with Resource Allocation


Fri

report

minimal effort.”
3 provides info

Bob Sim,
Service Desk Team Leader “Following the success of the new process, we have developed it further
to allow our Education customers to prioritize and schedule Desktop
support work themselves. This way, we are benefiting from their local
and specialist knowledge of their own environment. The customers are
delighted with this new support model”, Bob added.

The benefits
• All information is stored in one central application
• Significantly improved visibility of committed and free resources
• Greater flexibility for planning and emergencies
• Improved performance against SLA deadlines
• Improved customer communication and increased customer satisfaction

The future
“Axios has launched Smart Mail, an extension to the existing e-mail docket, which
will further enhance the automated confirmation e-mails to our customers. We are
also introducing assystMobile for our technicians so they can log into assyst from
their Blackberries, thus facilitating the reporting back to base. Moreover, the improved
resource scheduling process will allow us to narrow down the allocated date for a job
to a specific am or pm commitment. This will be a further great service improvement”,
Bob is convinced.

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