When engineering and technical consultancy Houlder was struggling with incompatible asset and incident management offerings and wanted a centralised way of tracking various issues as it expanded into Asia and the Middle East, it turned to Samanage.
According to Andy Matthews, IT manager at Houlder, equipment was at risk of being lost or broken more and more often.
“There was no central way to track issues. As the company grew, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep Excel spreadsheets up to date as employees passed equipment around,” Matthews says.
Instead of running a home-grown asset management system on the premises alongside Zendesk for incident maangement, Houlder adopted Samanage — now SolarWinds Service Desk — to reduce daily challenges and add IT services management functionality not available via Zendesk.
According to SolarWinds, Houlder needed a solution that would help them develop and manage new IT initiatives while focusing on cost and continually improving the business.
Matthews says the new cloud-based service desk and asset management platform provided an integrated, affordable solution that was easy to use and scale as the organisation grows.
Incident management has also been adopted across the whole company, with shorter ticket and hardware response times, as well as a knowledge base created not only by the new metrics but by the ability to move documentation consistently into the new platform, he says.
“We were able to get up and running in half an hour with an integrated solution,” he says. “It’s all in one place where we can easily see and track each device. Now, we get a real picture of our hardware, who’s using what, and where it is in the world.”
Additionally, on-boarding workflows help the organisation capture the right data via the IT service catalog, and when Matthews needs to make a business case for change, he can more easily demonstrate the workload and the types of requests the IT team receives.
