Case Study
A Manufacturing Partner – IT Help Desk Management with onshore/offshore modeling
Efficiently resolving the IT issues faced by the employees with a follow the sun coverage
Challenges
- A US-based manufacturing company needed an IT help desk for their 500+ user base, from 6AM EST – 8PM EST, to cover the entire US. Since it was a manufacturing company, handling all the IT issues faced on a day-to-day basis was not part of their expertise and resource bandwidth.
- Most of the calls were for Microsoft 365 office application support. There were also compatibility issues with cell phones and other frequently utilized applications, such as the company’s ERP system.
- They also needed continuous monitoring of various security standards and breaches.
- Additionally, there were hundreds of licenses for various Microsoft products, at various levels from factory workers to business managers, which needed to be managed on a timely basis.
Solution Implementation
- Since the client needed to serve employee needs across plant shifts spanning the whole workday across entire USA, the 6AM – 8PM (follow the sun) Monday – Friday Service Desk coverage was setup for all continental US-based workers.
- A US-based (east coast to align with the client company headquarters) Service Desk manager was assigned to the client, with an onshore/offshore analyst team taking calls and emails daily.
- In addition, the following services were provided:
- All licensing services, from procurement and assignment to management and auditing, with monthly reporting.
- Using Intune, several areas of monitoring were implemented and reviewed daily, including risky logins, unauthorized attempts, and phishing deterrents.
- An online eLearning library was included, as an icon in Teams, to quickly look up their own solutions within the Microsoft office application eLearning platform (e.g., when a customer cannot recall how to create Excel Macro, or a Word mailing list)
- Monthly reporting on SLAs was created, trending up to four statistics each month, such as ticket number by category, resolved tickets, average time to resolution and outliers, time to answer etc.
- Dynamic Dashboards and Reports were also provided, as part of the IT Help Desk System.
Technology Used
- Category : Technology/Platform/Methodology
- Collaboration, Productivity and Cloud based services : Microsoft 365
- Endpoint Management Software : Microsoft Intune
- Antivirus : Microsoft Defender
- ERP & CRM : Microsoft Dynamics
Results and Impact
- The Client could streamline the huge volume of IT support, licensing issues, and troubleshooting issues that were faced by its employees spread across the US and ensure timely resolution and removal of IT bottlenecks. A centralized, single platform to manage all issues with complete visibility and traceability.
- With a cutting-edge Help Desk system that had dynamic Dashboard and Reports, they could get a bird’s eye view of the patterns in IT issues faced regularly to take corrective and preventive actions (CAPA).
- They could utilize their time and resources on corporate goals and targets and help serve their end customers rather than handling IT issues that siphoned off much of their time.
- As part of Microsoft license management, there was a reduction in total license cost by 10%. This was achieved because of careful analysis of the license type to be purchased for each employee based on the actual roles and needs and then planning for premium or standard licenses accordingly.
- The employees could benefit from the centralized online eLearning library setup that was built on existing knowledge base documentation, so they could quickly resolve frequently faced issues instead of raising tickets for everything.