Wolters Kluwer Health Taps Alloy for IT Service Solution

The Challenge

As an international company with global operations, Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand relies on its service desk platforms in each country to support multiple users throughout its various locations 24/7. In 2005, the Auckland service desk, which supports the Auckland, Japan and Australia offices, realized they had outgrown their Track-It! service desk solution. The product offered limited scalability for a rapidly growing company.

“With Track-It! there were too many manual processes when creating tickets for users over the phone,” explained Brian Leybourne, Operations Engineer at the Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand site. “Even after being created, tickets would simply sit in a queue for our technicians to randomly select. There were no alerts, notifications or escalation capabilities that would help resolve these tickets in a timely fashion. The bottom line — we needed a system that would grow with us, rather than a product we would outgrow.”

The Solution

In early 2005, Mr. Leybourne and the local IT team evaluated a number of solutions in an effort to find the best product that could support its help desk operations. After battle-testing these solutions, the company selected Alloy Navigator from Alloy Software — a leading provider of service and asset management software solutions.

“Most of the solutions we reviewed were very costly,” explained Mr. Leybourne. “In terms of pricing, Alloy Navigator offered the best value and richest functionality.  With a feature set comparable — if not more expansive — than its competitors, choosing this product was a no-brainer.”

According to Mr. Leybourne, Alloy Navigator was extremely simple to install and fully deployed within weeks. The product is currently running on the Microsoft SQL Server with IIS installed for the Web portals. End users can create help desk tickets using the Self-Service Web portal via Internet Explorer 6 on XP clients, while technicians can access the Alloy Navigator on the main desktop application or over the Internet.

At Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand, Alloy Navigator is utilized for a variety of business processes. More than 200 users access the system from the company’s Auckland, New Zealand location, and 50 additional users from offices in Japan and Australia. Primarily, Alloy Navigator is being used as the company’s incident tracking system. Employees at the Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand, Japan, and Australia locations use the web portal or e-mail to log a ticket. This ticket is then automatically assigned to a technician based on a category. The technician then takes ownership of the ticket and maintains responsibility for it until the issue is resolved.

“We support more than 250 staff members located in New Zealand, Japan, and Australia, all from our Auckland site,” explained Mr. Leybourne. “Alloy Navigator allows us to support these 250 staff from one centralized location. We manage all aspects of IT support from help desk to level three issues, equipment rollout/maintenance, server support, and much more.”

In addition to its primary use, Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand has customized the solution to meet the needs of its growing business in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. According to Mr. Leybourne, the company prepared more than 200 business logic rules in addition to drafting supporting documentation and SOP guidelines for staff and IT. For example, Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand customized the Alloy Navigator system so that all users are required to enter certain information (depending on the type of support that is being requested) each time a new ticket is opened. Other customizations and workflows include automatic routing of tickets; e-mail alerts and notifications; requirement to enter times and activity details in order to have the full history of a support request; and much more.

“Based on our customizations of Alloy Navigator, the system is now designed to build a rule to cover just about any imaginable circumstance,” said Mr. Leybourne.

Alloy Navigator is also used to track all IT equipment located within each office around the world. In addition, a Purchase Order system manages all IT purchasing, and a Library function tracks all loaned equipment such as laptops and digital cameras.

The Results

According to Mr. Leybourne, Alloy Navigator has enabled Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand to streamline its IT help desk operations across three locations — a feat that was not achievable with its previous solution. The major benefit has been giving users the self-service capability of logging tickets themselves, allowing the entire organization to save time and money, and focus on its core business of publishing.

“Users are extremely happy with Alloy Navigator since they can log tickets, go back and view the complete history of a certain ticket, and guide an issue to resolution,” explained Mr. Leybourne. “Alloy Navigator also provides a powerful reporting system that allows Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand to monitor which users are logging tickets, specific reasons for them, and trend analysis of common issues.”

More than 350 tickets are entered in the Alloy Navigator system and resolved each month. With the latest version of Alloy Navigator, Wolters Kluwer Health New Zealand can now set specific business rules to ensure that the internal help desk operations run smoother.  These rules trigger e-mail notifications, user prompts, and auto-populated fields for more efficient and rapid resolutions of support requests.

Mr. Leybourne and his team have also found the support team at Alloy Software to be very helpful. “I have found the level of support and knowledge of their own product to be excellent,” he added. “They have been both patient and professional in answering a range of questions — from the most complex head-scratchers to the rather simple ones that I could have solved myself. Regardless, the support team has been a value-added benefit to a great product.”

“Simply put, Alloy Navigator is a comprehensive, feature-rich product that enables us to support a number of users across multiple locations,” explained Mr. Leybourne. “The product delivers on its promises, comes at a highly affordable price point, and has the backing of an excellent support team.”