“SolarWinds Service Desk provides a clickable format to easily automate rules, including API calls, creating new tickets, notifying people, and creating approvals. It makes our lives so much easier. It just works.” Seth Yeack , IT Support Operations Manager
About M/I Homes, Inc.
Based in Columbus, Ohio, M/I Homes, Inc. (NYSE: MHO), is one of the nation’s leading homebuilders, with operations in 17 markets and over 140,000 homes built. Founded in 1976 by Irving and Melvin Schottenstein, the firm has expanded steadily since its early years as a regional builder.
Challenge
As more M/I Homes communities have come online each year, the volume of permitting, materials sourcing, project management, and scheduling work crews has grown exponentially.
According to Seth Yeack, IT support operations manager, it became impossible to ignore the deluge of electronic forms requiring data entry, processing, and routing to specific stakeholders. These electronic forms were eating up resources and eroding staff productivity. In particular, termination requests from the human resources department became a logistical hurdle for the IT team.
“Terminations are especially time sensitive because there's a specific time it must be done,” Yeack states. “It’s crucial not to open up potential vulnerabilities, particularly if it’s taking your team significant time to process a termination.”
With an average time factor of 30 minutes per termination, Yeack and his team wanted a solution capable of automating, tracking, and displaying the metrics in a customizable view.
“Each termination accounts for roughly a half hour of staff time,” he says. “We added it up and found it equals about 50% of a full-time employee's time; I think we spend almost 1,000 hours a year just doing account management stuff.”
Yeack used the Power BI® Connector feature in SolarWinds® Service Desk to make the business case to devote employee time to automate the termination process.
Solution
Among management’s top-line objectives was ensuring service desk managers were empowered to better utilize their resources—including staff—and optimize processes to increase productivity, thereby saving time and money.
Integration with Power BI, the Microsoft® interactive data visualization solution, was a must to achieve full visibility into the ticket volume and data.
Having already deployed Power BI to gain visualizations from several applications running on the M/I Homes SQL Server® instances, Yeack brought SolarWinds Service Desk online, leveraging connectors with forms from human resources. Collecting data on the volume of tickets would provide valuable insights for allocating resources and prioritizing automation to underpin key business initiatives.
Data from SolarWinds Service Desk using Microsoft Power BI connectors displays real-time ticket volume and provides senior management of M/I Homes with actionable insights for critical budget and personnel allocation decisions.
By far the largest percentage of ticket flow came from onboarding new hires and terminations.
“Clearly, automating termination workflow would be a big win and demonstrably could save a lot of work hours and reduce mistakes due to the manual nature of the task,” Yeack states.
“SolarWinds is the right choice for our business because it provides a winning combination of ease of use, automation, low admin overhead, and a simple UI.”
Choosing the best service solution for the homebuilder’s sprawling and diverse infrastructure was especially crucial to Yeack. In his role as IT support operations manager, he manages the IT service desk and is the point person for disseminating incident metrics to department heads and senior executives.
Equally important was the need to find easy-to-use tools and increase simplicity when it came time to roll service templates out to other departments populated with non-IT staff.
“A big issue for us is the ease of use due to the lean size of our team. With the number of users we support, efficiency is everything.”
In exploring IT service management (ITSM) platforms in the past, Yeack ruled out costly, high-maintenance solutions designed for large enterprise organizations.
“We can’t use platforms like ServiceNow®, which take an entire team just to support,” he comments.
In preparing to justify using SolarWinds Service Desk and growing ITSM usage over time, Yeack decided to build a case by focusing on the utility of Power BI.
Product Mix
- SolarWinds Service Desk
- SolarWinds Samanage®
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Year Founded: 1976
Employees: 1,550
IT Environment: On-premises, hybrid cloud, colocation
Benefits
Yeack was intent on proving the value of the investment in ITSM. First was taming the time-consuming and labor-intensive regimen of onboarding and terminating employees.
“Just a few members of the HR staff were authorized to file such a ticket, and it accounted for the bulk of the IT department’s service desk requests,” he comments.
With the connectors Power BI provided, SolarWinds Service Desk continuously feeds data into the dashboards. These dashboards give Yeack and his team the information they need to prioritize their next projects and show a positive return on their past projects.
“The dashboard view now shows how many terminations we have and how much time ostensibly we're sinking into those terminations,” Yeack states. “We do API calls from the process within the ticket that handles the actual termination, and Power BI shows us how much time we spend. Now, when HR tells us someone needs to get termed, sending the confirmation email is entirely automated, so no human interaction is needed.”
This is a big win, Yeack points out, “because we typically have to cut off access [to company assets] at a specified time. Now, we don’t have to tell one of our agents that at a specific time, they have to stop what they’re doing and handle the task.”
Following the rollout of SolarWinds Service Desk to the entire IT department, Yeack oversaw deployment in the loan operations team. He adds it's now also in use by compliance and the servicing department.
“I'd recommend SolarWinds to any of my peers that run a lean team because there's really no overhead unless you want it to modify templates and customize. It just works.”
Some of the capabilities and benefits Yeack has documented from the SolarWinds Service Desk deployment include the following:
Ease of Use: “From the admin side, everything in Service Desk is labeled in a way that makes sense, which isn't always all that common in service desk solutions,” Yeack states. “To create a new ticket template, add a new user, adjust access levels, these sorts of things are all super straightforward. No one needs to memorize terms specific to this software pack that might change in five months.”
Thanks to the superior user interface and better architecture of SolarWinds Service Desk compared to other solutions, Yeack says day-to-day configuration tasks are greatly simplified.
“Having automation underneath the ticketing tab is great,” he states. “We can do API calls from there to create other tickets and establish rules to notify the appropriate people if needed. SolarWinds Service Desk really simplifies it, and it's just an easy-to-use, clickable format.”
Real-Time Visualization: By providing visibility and quantifying the volume of tickets by category, Yeack says he can now report to management which operational areas require budget and allocation of personnel time.
“It makes it easier for me to justify asking for funding for a specific project and build a case for realigning people's time to get this done,” he states. “By highlighting the volume of tickets, we can now say, ‘This is how many terms we have, this is how many users we have, and this is how much time it takes.’”
Speedy Adoption, Less Training: As the number of departments in the service catalog templates of SolarWinds Service Desk has grown, Yeack says deployment time has been compressed.
“Now, explaining the system to team leaders only takes about 20 minutes, and they rarely have to ask follow-up questions. For example, after we set it up with the finance department, they’ve been running along without incident ever since.”
Budgeting and Resource Allocation: Drawing from operational and analytical skills honed while earning his MBA, Yeack prioritized collecting data from the Power BI integration to build a business case for ITSM to managers. By aggregating ticketing data and using the Samanage visualization, the IT team can now reliably build use cases for managers regarding which projects can likely deliver the highest return on investment.
“Monitoring the number of tickets through Power BI generated by new hires over their first 60 days provides a great deal of insight,” he says. “In those requests, we can see a pattern. ‘Are salespeople from this division asking consistently for the same thing? Maybe we need to update our documentation.’ It is easy to maintain the database of what access and applications people actually need.”
SolarWinds Service Desk Beyond IT
Today, the entire IT department benefits from the Service Desk, Samanage, and Power BI-based ITSM infrastructure. All told, the streamlining of ticketing, accelerating troubleshooting, and issue resolution drives efficiencies throughout the geographically dispersed M/I Homes organization.
“We have it in our loan operations, compliance, and the servicing department,” Yeack adds. “They’re all using SolarWinds to track tickets and incidents with that specific set of software.”
“We really needed ease of use, and our SolarWinds Service Desk implementation has been the core element in achieving that goal,” he says. “Due to the low training threshold, I can go on vacation and not worry about taking my laptop because I know everything will work. That was definitely a big selling point. Also, the return on investment (ROI) was better than really any other platform out there right now. For what we needed to gain simplicity and better efficiencies, SolarWinds delivered.”
“It’s important to us that vendors are responsive, which is easier said than done. With SolarWinds, I’ve never had any problems. I reach out, and I get everything promptly, with no issues whatsoever.”
