2 page Case Study - Posted 7/21/2008
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Faster Responses to Customers, Better Quality of Life for Staff Using Mobile Solution
IT provider ACES needed a solution that would help after-hours staff respond quickly to customers without having to find an Internet connection and receive disruptive pages. With Windows Mobile® phones, the company greatly improved its response time and the quality of life of its on-call staff, as well as the ability to address issues before they became crises. Greater efficiency has improved ACES’s profitability.
Business Needs
Advanced Computers Engineering Solutions (ACES) provides outsourced IT solutions throughout rural northeast Iowa. ACES has monitored and supported its small and medium-sized clients’ networks since 1995. The company takes pride in keeping client networks up and running and in quickly resolving any problems. But the engineers assigned to evening and weekend support duty had a challenging job.
ACES monitored its customers’ systems using a third-party application running on the Windows Server® 2003 Standard operating system with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003. When a client device or service failed, the monitoring system automatically paged the on-call engineer, and sent a copy of the alert to that person’s mailbox through Microsoft Exchange Server. “You had to get out of bed, or stop whatever you were doing if it was on a weekend, find a computer, and address the issue,” says Phil Kenealy, President of ACES. “Because on-call staff were required to stay within a 45-minute drive of Internet access, they were pretty much restricted to home or to a place they knew had an Internet connection.”
Being tethered to an Internet connection was inconvenient. What’s more, the pager solution itself was problematic. When the pager sounded an alert, staff needed to determine whether the problem required a visit to the client site or whether it could be remediated remotely using Terminal Services. But the character limits of the pagers’ tiny screens meant staff could only see a little bit of information.
“If the alert had a lot of information, it would be chopped up into little bits and pieces and you might get a dozen pages at 3:30 a.m.,” says Kenealy. The pages became highly disruptive—the monitoring system would continue to send alerts until somebody stopped them, even if the problem didn’t need hands-on remediation. Kenealy adds, “We had a point where only one of our eight engineers was willing to be on call because of the number of pages they were receiving in the middle of the night resulting in lack of sleep.”
Solution
To meet its customer Service Level Agreements with ease and to keep on-call employees happy, ACES’s staff needed tools that would let them respond to customer alerts anywhere at any time, without disruption to their lives.
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Our after-hours response times are 50 percent faster than before and are more consistent. … It has increased our confidence in our ability to deliver, and that confidence comes through on a sales call. |
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Phil Kenealy President, ACES |
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After a 90-day trial run, ACES deployed Motorola Q Phones running the Windows Mobile® operating system to its field staff, and also upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. “Our alerting system notifies our on-call staff by sending an e-mail via Exchange Server to the mobile phone,” says Kenealy. “Staff can then use the Internet access feature of Windows Mobile to establish a Terminal Services connection to the client network to perform system maintenance.”
The migration to Windows Mobile was seamless. “I can’t remember any issue that was even a challenge to resolve,” says Kenealy. “This was a really good way for us to do maintenance without our customers feeling the impact.” The company also evaluated BlackBerry-based solutions but concluded that their remote system administration tools were not as robust.
With Windows Mobile phones staff can easily see, in one e-mail message that is as long as necessary, whether a problem can be handled remotely or requires an onsite visit. “Many times our staff can remediate the condition without making a trip to the office or back home to their Internet portals,” says Kenealy. “Even if they do need a computer, they can now plug their [Windows Mobile] smartphone into a laptop and use it like a data card, without leaving the picnic.”
ACES also saw value in choosing a solution based on familiar Microsoft software that would mesh easily with their Exchange Server–based environment. It would also position ACES to expand its service portfolio to include mobile solutions. “Ninety percent of the solutions we support are Microsoft solutions,” Kenealy says. “Now that our customers see us using Windows Mobile, they start asking about it. If they want to deploy mobility solutions, they have somebody to turn to.”
Benefits
Using Windows Mobile, ACES has a much faster client-response time and the quality of life of on-call staff has greatly improved. The team has become better able to anticipate and resolve issues and has become more efficient, which increases profitability.
Faster Response Time
Staff customer-alert response time has sped up significantly. “Our after-hour response times are 50 percent faster than before and are more consistent,” Kenealy says. “We’re always able to achieve our response time—usually in significantly less time than we promised in our Service Level Agreements. It has increased our confidence in our ability to deliver, and that confidence comes through on a sales call.”
Further, Windows Mobile helps the ACES team monitor and reach the source of an alert more quickly. “In combination with all of ACES tools, Windows Mobile helps us be a proactive IT provider, instead of the fireman that’s only there after the crisis happens,” says Kenealy. “It helps us know what’s going on at a client site often before they know it themselves, and to remediate the issue before they even know there’s a problem.”
Improved Quality of Life
Windows Mobile phones give staff the freedom to respond to alerts from anywhere. They are no longer required to be near a computer that has an Internet connection, and they no longer receive disruptive pages. “How do you quantify improved quality of life?” asks Kenealy. “Staff now volunteer for on-call duty, instead of avoiding it like the plague.”
Increased Profitability
ACES provides its monitoring and alerting solution, and the remediation that goes along with it, for a fixed cost. “ACES’s profitability is dictated by how efficiently we provide our services,” Kenealy says. “Any reduction in the amount of time we spend providing the ‘up time’ our customers want obviously increases our profitability.”
