Background

Gourmet Trading Company is a Los Angeles based family business founded in 1982. With control over the supply chain of fresh asparagus and blueberries, they offer superior service to customers and growers all over the world, with farms in America, Mexico, and Peru.

From the California headquarters, the Gourmet Trading Company’s IT department includes five team members who support the global company.

Challenges

The IT team at Gourmet Trading Company was using Request Tracker for help desk ticketing. One of the biggest problems they were facing with the solution was that there was tremendous administrative overhead to customize the program for their needs. The team found that the Request Tracker software was not very modern or user friendly, and they were spending a significant amount of time troubleshooting, modifying, and learning the software instead supporting users. “There were no real graphical reports or default settings that would enable my team to track ticket progression or how many tickets were in the queue,” said Chris Capelton, IT Manager at Gourmet Trading Company. “When you’re a small IT department, you want to spend as much time as possible supporting users, and less time troubleshooting your own internal help desk software.”

The IT team did not see Request Tracker as a user friendly solution. “To work with the solution and customize it, our team members had to know Linux and use that Linux knowledge to program the help desk,” said Capelton. “Not every team member is going to be grounded in Linux, this requirement really bottlenecked who could modify the solution, rather than allowing for full team collaboration on help desk and facility issues.”

Request Tracker also did not give Gourmet Trading Company the opportunity to track assets, device contracts, hardware maintenance requests, or link the assets to users. “As a growing global company, it became imperative for us to know who owned what, where they were located, and what issues were occurring with the device,” said Capelton.

As the IT manager, Capelton knew the only reason to keep Request Tracker was that there were minimal dollar costs associated with it, however, it created a lot of additional expense in time and resources. “We needed a solution that was less overhead for the team and allowed them to do their jobs,” said Capelton.

Solution

Knowing that it was time to make a change, Capelton began the search for a new ITSM solution with his team. The features that were at the top of their list for their next IT service desk software were:

• One system that included help desk ticketing and asset management
• Easily customizable without the need for third party services
• Ability to create an audit trail and backup the help desk
• Cloud-based, allowing users to connect to the service desk with just Internet access

After going through a trial with Samanage, Capelton found the ease of use was exactly what Gourmet Trading Company was looking for. “It was an easy process to get Samanage set up,” said Capelton. “I didn’t have to set up a server or anything. It was just log into the account and get to it. For us, the greatest part of Samanage during the implementation was the help menus that walked us easily through the setup. Basically you can implement the software on your own, and fast.”

Benefits

“Samanage is intuitive and simple,” said Capelton. “Technicians who don’t have programming knowledge can administer the software and focus on their work.”

“We’ve gone from centralized management of a software, to having better collaboration across the team,” said Capelton. “We’re no longer limited to waiting for one person to program the software, I can delegate tasks throughout the team.”

Previously the help desk knowledge base was broken into multiple places, from Google docs to hard drives, and there was no one repository for all the information. Now, with Samanage, the Gourmet Trading Company’s IT team has one place for all the help desk knowledge that can easily be accessed for ticket resolutions. At the same time, the customized forms within Samanage and the knowledge base allow users to submit or find their own resolutions, allowing the help desk team to focus on larger incidents and problems. “We can track tickets throughout their lifecycle and move them through problems, changes, and releases with ease,” said Capelton. “For example, we have predefined solutions setup for common issues. These solutions can be routed to users in seconds rather than minutes or hours. This overall approach saves the help desk time, the employees time, and the company money.”

“Samanage lets us be more collaborative and do our jobs a lot better,” said Capelton. “The opportunity to track and have visibility into what are our biggest problems will give us the support we need to modify and improve processes in the future.”