– Kevin J. Smith, Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Business Unit, FrontRange, says:
SAIT Polytechnic, a post-secondary institution with over 2,200 faculty and staff and 75,000 students, has adopted Frontrange’s HEAT Service Management solution. Based in Alberta, Canada, SAIT had been using separate help desk applications to support its academic and administrative departments but found that attempts to collaborate on common technical issues became too difficult to manage. As a result, the school has turned to HEAT Service Management to consolidate and centralize its distributed service desk that now provides automated supportautomate for its students and staff.
“HEAT is now the support system used throughout the organization,” said Scott Taylor, Manager of Technical Services at SAIT Polytechnic. “It gives us the holistic view of support that we need for our clients, the students, staff and visitors to SAIT.”
By transitioning to FrontRange, all of the service desks at the college have access to HEAT. Now, instead of entering service requests in multiple systems, everything is channeled directly through HEAT, which significantly improves incident and service request tracking.
Since upgrading to HEAT, SAIT has been able to support twice as many service request tickets. The IT support team expects to easily handle over 4,000 service desk tickets during the fall, winter and spring quarters. The upgrade has also introduced process efficiency improvements. The school’s Microsoft® Active Directory is fully integrated with HEAT which automatically updates changes to customer information while maintaining strict compliance with existing business rules.
“We were manually importing customer and asset data,” said Taylor. “It would take weeks to add new students, and it was done on a nightly basis. HEAT automates and significantly streamlines this process.”
“SAIT’s successful use of FrontRange’s HEAT Service Management demonstrates the advantages of consolidating critical IT service management functions on a single solution that can be easily extended across the enterprise,” said Steve Lindeman, chief customer officer (CCO) at FrontRange.
HEAT’s flexible interface has given the staff the freedom to mold the platform to their specific requirements. “If another group has developed an enhancement, we can take their configurations and implement it ourselves. With HEAT’s intuitive configuration tools, we don’t need programmers to modify the system. HEAT allows us to adapt our support requirements to our unique business needs.”
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