Ellsworth Adhesives Improves Enterprise Service Management with TeamDynamix, Leading to Better Efficiency

Communication can be challenging in any organization, and that’s especially true in large companies with many divisions and employees. At Ellsworth Adhesives, the IT team supports about 1,600 end-users worldwide in a variety of roles, including sales, marketing, customer service, engineers and chemists.

With such a diverse set of support needs, it’s critical that everyone can communicate and collaborate effectively.

“It’s made our jobs so much easier."

When requests are made and tasks are assigned using email, it’s easy for items to fall through the cracks. Companies like Ellsworth Adhesives not only need a platform to support IT requests but other groups such as HR, legal and facilities are also involved in enterprise service.

An Enterprise Service Management (ESM) platform can help. ESM takes the concept of IT Service Management (ITSM) and applies it to other areas within an organization, such as HR and facilities maintenance—resulting in better and more efficient delivery of services.

Without the right tool in place, tasks can be missed and valuable time is wasted. Email isn’t always the most efficient way to request services, for example. It typically requires a lot of back-and-forth communication for employees to understand the exact nature of a service request, leading to delays that can slow productivity.

Ellsworth Adhesives uses TeamDynamix, a cloud-based ESM platform, to streamline service and enhance coordination among its global workforce. Nearly a dozen different departments are using the system to manage employee service requests – from IT, Security and Procurement to Quality Control and Environmental Health and Safety.

“It’s made our jobs so much easier,” says IT Service Desk Manager Adam Crichlow.

A Flexible, Versatile System

Before implementing TeamDynamix, Ellsworth Adhesive was using another ticketing system across multiple departments. But this other system wasn’t stable, and it would often crash. It was also very limited in what it could do, Crichlow said. There wasn’t a lot of automation, and team leaders couldn’t customize the service portal easily to fit different use cases.

Crichlow and his colleagues wanted a flexible, versatile system that could easily be configured for use across the entire organization. They were also looking for a solution that would offer more capabilities going forward, including change management and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) features.

They found all of this—and more—in TeamDynamix.

A highly flexible platform for managing IT and enterprise service tickets, projects, assets and changes, TeamDynamix allows users to create their own unique service categories and build automated workflows for managing multistep processes without any knowledge of coding required.

With TeamDynamix, Crichlow and his colleagues have easily created customized online service catalogs and dynamic forms for collecting information from users about the nature of their service requests. The information collected during this process allows for tickets to be routed automatically to the appropriate staff members for resolution, without burdening help desk staff with this responsibility.

Game-Changing Automation

Having a customizable and easy-to-use service portal has been a game changer for the company.

Within the IT department, the help desk used to receive about 80 percent of service requests through email, 15 percent through phone calls and walkups and only 5 percent through the service portal. Now, 95 percent of requests come through the portal, 5 percent come through walkups, and the help desk team no longer accepts email requests.

“The automation capabilities in TeamDynamix are far above anything I’ve used before in other solutions. It’s made my life much better.”

To make it as easy as possible for people to use the service portal, the IT department created an app that opens the portal automatically on employees’ desktops.

“We were getting 80 to 90 service requests per day, and the help desk team couldn’t filter and rout them all quickly enough,” Crichlow says. With the portal, however, this all happens automatically. This shift alone has cut the time it takes from creating to resolving a service ticket nearly in half.

Using TeamDynamix “has freed up staff time right away,” Crichlow says—a benefit the company realized “almost on day one” of using the system.

As other departments have seen the efficiencies that TeamDynamix has created, they’ve also adopted the ESM system. The latest department to create its own service portal using the platform is the Environmental Health and Safety team, which never used the old ticketing system for service management before.

Ellsworth Adhesives is a global corporation that supplies a wide range of adhesives, sealants, lubricants, coatings, encapsulants, tapes, soldering products, surface preparations, specialty chemicals and dispensing equipment.

Earning Back Trust

Aside from saving time and improving efficiency, Ellsworth Adhesive has benefitted from having better information about how well they’re delivering services to employees—including response times and key problem areas.

“Ease of reporting was another big draw for using TeamDynamix,” Crichlow says.

Not only do team managers have more detailed information that helps them improve their service delivery, but the transparency of service data has helped to forge better trust between IT staff and the employees they support.

Because the company’s old ticketing system was so problematic, Crichlow said, response times for service requests were often slow—and the IT department had what Crichlow admits was a “rocky” relationship with company employees because of this. Now, he says, “People are more receptive to changes we want to implement because we’ve earned back their trust. It’s much easier for us to advance our initiatives, and we don’t have to fight tooth and nail to get people to buy in.”

Ellsworth Adhesive has been using TeamDynamix for about a year, and in that time the system has made a huge difference Crichlow says, “I’m looking forward to getting even more value from the platform in the months ahead.”

“The automation capabilities in TeamDynamix are far above anything I’ve used before in other solutions,” he concludes. “It’s made my life much better.”