Meritide’s PointPath solution for BMC Remedy-SharePoint integration provided the Pitney Bowes Global Engineering Group with numerous benefits. Incidents were better organized, had higher initial assignment levels, and gave real-time status visibility for end users and techs.
Pitney Bowes’ Global Engineering Services group members consist of incident and service managers who use Remedy in a standard support model. They also have engineers and technicians that perform or request work from other engineers that are not familiar with – and do not have access to – BMC Software’s Remedy ITSM suite. These groups were often managing their work and incidents outside of Remedy and their incidents were not being tracked appropriately or coordinated with other incidents in Remedy.
There was a desire to get this work information back into Remedy and a need for a high level of flexibility for Engineering Services group members to request and assign service incidents of other engineering groups directly.
Management was interested in utilizing the Pitney Bowes SharePoint rollout. The goal was to provide engineers a simple way to enter and identify incidents assigned to them and their groups, and monitor or escalate incidents that needed attention through the SharePoint interface. They wanted to personalize and prioritize the information presented using SharePoint personalization capabilities.
After considering other options such as building the integration internally, PointPath was the best solution for Pitney Bowes because it delivered all of their essential Service Desk needs in a single solution. PointPath, having a foundation in both Remedy and SharePoint, made the decision clear.
PointPath provided two main integrations for Pitney Bowes.
The first was the development of a SharePoint list for Remedy incidents. This list presents information from outside of SharePoint as a SharePoint list. The information can be manipulated and reviewed using the same functionality as a regular SharePoint list. The list was tailored to only provide targeted incidents for the engineering groups that were participating to provide “All Open Engineering Incidents” and “Engineering Incidents from the last 90 days.” Users were also given personalized lists for “My Open Incidents” and “My Assigned Incidents.”
The second integration provided the ability to enter new incidents from within SharePoint. This was done using the SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and a custom Remedy mid-tier web service. Users were provided a way to enter incidents by selecting the Incident Type and their issue within a standard SharePoint list form and their selection drove the assignment of the operational categories and group assignments within Remedy.
This simplified the process by reducing the list of operational categories presented to the engineers and allowed them to immediately assign the incident to the group that was responsible for delivering the service. The incident was immediately created in Remedy and available to both the Remedy service users and the submitter through their SharePoint views.
Pitney Bowes Global Engineering Group saw immediate benefits through higher visibility of open incidents for their organization, visibility and access to lists of what incidents were open by group, and immediate and detailed availability of incidents assigned to individuals through their SharePoint lists.
The incidents being entered were also better organized, had a higher level of initial assignments to groups and categories, and incidents that were not entered or tracked in the past were being entered, managed, and monitored.
PointPath was a natural fit for our requirements. It allowed us to bridge our incident tracking system with our deployment of SharePoint which allows us to take full advantage of SharePoint’s capabilities.
We will now have an easier means of managing, reporting and analyzing our incidents by accessing them through SharePoint which will provide value-add to the service we provide our customers.
– Jeff Gonzalez, IT Manager
Pitney Bowes powers transactions that drive commerce. They provide data so businesses can market to their best customers, enable the sending of parcels and packages across the globe, and secure payments through statements and invoices to keep clients moving forward.
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