Merlin Housing Society and Bron Afon Community Housing improve IT efficiency

sitehelpdesk-IT will provide both housing associations with a web-based system to log calls from end users to their internal IT departments and help them respond to IT issues more efficiently. It also allows IT departments to retain an effective disaster recovery plan by keeping a log of all IT equipment, including location and who is responsible for what, so that it can be recovered or fixed quickly. The software logs all calls and monitors how quickly each query is dealt with to provide detailed reports for senior managers about how the IT department is performing.

Sitehelpdesk.com's add-on applications including SLAmonitor, EMLmonitor and WMImonitor are also being used by both housing societies. SLAmonitor helps to measure service level agreements and manages end user expectations by alerting the IT department when a service level threshold has been exceeded. EMLmonitor connects to the IT department's mail server and audits emails that are meant for them so that a ticket can be logged and a response is immediately sent to the user. Giving a clear indication of how many software components are running at any given time, WMImonitor is an auditing tool which enables IT departments to view what software they have purchased and how many computers this is installed on.

South Gloucestershire-based Merlin Housing Society was founded two years ago and has an IT department of nine employees who service 300 staff. Last year it implemented a new IT infrastructure utilising the latest industry standards, and began looking into internal support software. ICT infrastructure manager, Chris Stanton explains, 'Being a relatively new housing association, we are moving forward and investing in new IT equipment. In line with this we wanted to ensure our IT department could manage issues and problems quickly and effectively, monitor our service level agreements, track the company assets and report back to senior management. Having carried out an extensive tendering exercise we found that sitehelpdesk.com products are the most cost effective and superior solution on the market to meet our business requirements. The software is installed and will go live at the end of July 2009.'

Bron Afon Community Housing set up in March 2008, employs over 450 staff (around 350 IT users) and has an IT department of nine employees. When the organisation started out it outsourced its IT service desk support, but sought to improve its service and take more control. Eventually it brought its front-line service department in-house, Leighton Keenan, ICT Manager explains, 'We were attracted to sitehelpdeks.com mainly through its simplicity. It met all of our requirements and is an extremely cost-effective solution. Having implemented it quickly and trained all of our staff, the software went live on 21 July 2009. The web-based interface allowed us to roll the system out to all users easily, helping us to focus on supporting the organisation which in turn, allows the organisation as a whole to operate more efficiently.'