Tom Wright owns a small computer company in Folsom, California. Many companies in this city prefer to outsource computer network management to Tom rather than to hire computer techs for their own. "Advanced Network Technologies" (that is the name of the Tom's firm) keeps reasonable prices and good quality, and his client base grows permanently. At one moment Tom understood that he cannot accept the new customers because his personnel is busy serving other clients, and he does not have any free resources to take one more network for support and administration.
"Of course I could try to hire one more technician," - Tom says - "but that won't solve the problem. First of all, my clients like my job because I have only qualified network engineers in my staff, and it will take time to find a new guy who is good, I mean - REALLY good. Then, after I will find him, I have to teach him the rules of our company, our business processes, etc. - anyway, it will take a few months to make him a team member in full. And my clients do not want to wait".
Tom identified two different problems here. The first was the time they needed to become familiar with the client's network configuration in the very beginning. Normally, this took them 1-3 days of the on-site work with each particular customer. After they learned how the client's network is organized (the network engineer that does this job wrote a detailed report that can be used later by the other engineers if they had to fix a problem occurred in that network), they start accepting calls from the customer's personnel. After receiving such a call, a network engineer reviewes the report that was written in the very begnning and either tries to solve the problem by telephone, or goes to the customer's site and fixes the problem by himself. Since it was impossible to describe all aspects of the network configuration in that preliminary report and then keep the report up-to-date, in most cases the guys had to go to the customer's site, and that took time.
"What we had to do was to find a way to do our job more efficiently. And we found the solution." - Tom said.
Tom found Asset Tracker for Networks, a software program able to make complete diagnistics of the client's network and computer equipment and save collected information in a database for later use. Asset Tracker makes a full snapshot of all computers and network equipment configuration of the client's network, including PC's hardware configuration, software configuration, routers settings, etc. This snapshot contained much more information than the report writen for each client before, and it could be done in minutes. The complete network report could be stored on the central server of the Tom's company so that every network engineer working for "Advanced Network Technologies" could access in the case of a problem occurred on the customer's side.
After receiving a problem report, the network engineer at "Advanced Network Technologies" could take a short look into the that snapshop and, having the full report of the computer configuration on his screen, suggest a solution that most likelly fixed the problem by telephone.
Using Asset Tracker dramatically decreased the time network engineers spent serving each particular customer, providing them with the higher level of service at the same time. Asset Tracker saved 1-2 full engineer's days writing a detailed report for each new customer, and helped resolve 50-70% daily issues by telephone without having to leave the office to the customer's side. This saved a lot of time and helped Tom not only get that new customer, but also free necessary resources to hire and teach the new tech to get ready for the future customers to come to his office.