MarketLab Embraces 'Smart Service Management' for Faster IT Service Delivery

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Too often, providing IT service and support is like putting out fires.

Already overworked and under-resourced to begin with, IT employees often spend too much time and effort just responding to incidents usually to the detriment of strategic projects that can help their company achieve big-picture goals.

With the help of TeamDynamix, the IT department for MarketLab—a leading supplier of products for the healthcare industry—is changing how it operates, becoming more proactive instead of merely reactive in its IT service delivery. 

“We have realized improved end-user satisfaction, reduced administrative strain, optimized processes and gained better visibility with deep analytics,” explained Enterprise Systems Engineer Brendan Lesinski.

The simplicity and automation built into the TeamDynamix IT Service Management (ITSM) platform is saving time for MarketLab IT staff. What’s more, the easy visibility into key service data is helping IT leaders glean important insights into the root cause of incidents.

As a result, MarketLab IT employees are working smarter and more efficiently, and they’re able to provide better service for the company’s employees.

Saving Time, Expediting IT Service

Based in Caledonia, Michigan, MarketLab provides medical supplies to hospitals and healthcare facilities. Its products and services range “from hospital beds to Band-Aids and everything in between,” Lesinski explained.

The company’s IT department was using Microsoft SharePoint to manage its service and support, but it quickly outgrew SharePoint’s capabilities.

“It might have worked at some point, but it became unmanageable once we reached a certain level in terms of complexities and fluidity,” Lesinski said.

Because SharePoint wasn’t designed specifically for IT ticketing, IT staff were spending too much time making changes to the various forms they used to collect information on IT incidents and problems. In addition, those changes would often break reports the team relied on, causing additional work to be done to remedy any errors.

And since it was much simpler for company employees to email the IT department to request service instead of logging into SharePoint and filling out a form, most employees opted for this route instead—which meant the IT department had no way of tracking those requests and often had to go back and forth to get all the information needed to create the ticket themselves before addressing the employees’ issues.

MarketLab switched to TeamDynamix ITSM about a year ago, and Lesinski said the new system is “universally loved.”

“We wanted a tool that could be used as a service portal for potentially anything, as well as project management,” he said. “We found a lot of the other tools we were looking at were very hyper-focused on just ticketing or just project management, which is fine, but we wanted a tool that could do it all and be easily managed by people in facilities or our HR department while still giving us complete control of how married together those experiences are. We liked that the flexibility was there [in TeamDynamix] and we could manage the tool in a way that works best for us.” 

Immediately, IT staff saved a great deal of time with the new system. The platform’s low-code, no-code design makes it very easy to make changes, such as adding new fields to forms. “What used to be a 45-minute effort now takes two minutes in TeamDynamix,” Lesinski said.

In addition, the system’s built-in automation has transformed MarketLab’s delivery of IT services. For instance, service tickets can be generated from email requests automatically. Lesinski calls this auto-creation feature “brilliant,” adding: “It has resulted in significantly less lost work.”

Using Data for Better Decision-Making

Another big improvement the MarketLab team has experienced since the switch to TeamDynamix is the ability to run reports and view IT service data on the fly.

Before, if IT leaders wanted to know how many service requests they’ve had for a particular system, they had to write a query within the SQL database. This was a very time-consuming process, and as a result, it seldom happened.

“In most 8-hour days, you just don’t have the 45 minutes needed to do that – it’s not a difficult process per se, but it’s very tedious and takes time I don’t have,” Lesinski explained.

With TeamDynamix, these kinds of reports can be generated in a matter of seconds, making them much more likely to occur. As a result, IT leaders are improving their decision-making by using real-time, actionable data to identify key areas of need and advocate for the appropriate resources to address them.

“With TeamDynamix, if you have an idea around data and want to pull a report to see what you need, it’s just there – you have the charts and graphs or the hard numbers if you need them,” Lesinski said.

Decreasing Ticket Volume with Root-cause Analysis

The insights that IT leaders are gaining from using TeamDynamix enable them to recognize patterns and identify the root cause of problems, instead of having to fix the same issues over and over. This big-picture view allows them to be more strategic while also providing improved service outcomes.

For example, MarketLab’s IT department had been receiving many service requests related to the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. However, after implementing TeamDynamix, Lesinski and his colleagues realized that more than half of those requests were linked to a single screen.

“Just by stabilizing this one screen, we were able to greatly reduce the number of problems our employees were experiencing,” he said. This, in turn, also reduced the number of tickets the IT service desk received.

An ITSM Tool That’s Easy to Use and Manage

Moving forward, MarketLab plans to use TeamDynamix to manage large IT projects as well.

“This realistically gives us a shot to define how much work we’re doing and who’s doing what,” Lesinski says. As a result, the company will be able to set priorities, allocate resources and manage multiple projects more effectively – something they’ve struggled to do before.

TeamDynamix has been very easy to use and manage, Lesinski notes, and the platform has made a huge difference for MarketLab’s IT team.

“I almost never think about the administrative aspect of the platform,” Lesinski said. “That, to me, is proof of its effectiveness. It just does what it’s supposed to do. I don’t have to babysit it like I do with other systems.”

A big part of the success of this project is due, in part, to the actual implementation delivery. “I’ve implemented several different systems and software over the years – everything from manufacturing-specific systems to ERPs – and the TeamDynamix implementation is the best experience I’ve had,” Lesinski said.

“Our TeamDynamix implementation team was attentive and would often go the extra mile to not only answer the questions we would have but to also give us options as well as the pros and cons of each way of doing things – the communication was bar none,” he said.