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SAIT Polytechnic Consolidates Help Desk Management

• By Leila Meyer
• 08/13/14

SAIT Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada has switched to a unified help desk application for its academic and administrative departments to improve technical support across the campus.

Previously, the college used separate help desk applications to support its academic and administrative departments, making it difficult to track tickets or collaborate on common issues. The information systems team also had to manually import customer and asset data into its old help desk system, and it would take weeks to add new students to the system.

In an effort to improve its workflow, the team decided to consolidate and automate its help desk systems by implementing FrontRange's HEAT Service Management solution across different teams and service desks. With HEAT, all service requests are channeled through HEAT. Faculty, staff and students can manage their own tickets through browser-based Web forms, and the information services team can more easily track tickets. According to FrontRange, "since upgrading to HEAT, SAIT has been able to support twice as many service request tickets."

SAIT's Microsoft Active Directory system is integrated with HEAT, "which allows updates and changes to customer information to follow the existing business-rule system," according to FrontRange.

In addition to HEAT Service Management, SAIT has also implemented HEAT's Self-Service and Survey modules. The Self-Service module is intended to help improve service desk efficiency and reduce service desk workloads, while the Survey module solicits user feedback to help the information systems team improve performance.

In the future, SAIT hopes to further improve its process and automation by implementing product enhancements developed by other groups. "If another group has developed an enhancement, we can take their configurations and implement it ourselves," said Scott Taylor, manager of Technical Services at SAIT Polytechnic, in a prepared statement.