The El Dorado Irrigation District (EID) excels at supplying water to the nearly 110,000 people in Northern California’s El Dorado County. Yet, the internal management of its IT service tickets was a trickier matter. The outdated service desk tool and manual methods its small IT team was employing no longer sufficed.

Since information on general procedures as well as ticket status was not centralized, EID’s 215 employees relied heavily on the IT department, which they called and emailed frequently. IT staff spent hours logging and routing service tickets, leaving them little time for proactive infrastructure maintenance work. Sometimes, the status of tickets would fall through the cracks. “The system was not very efficient or smart,” said EID CIO Tim Ranstrom.

Realizing he needed ITIL-based service desk software, Ranstrom chose Agiloft, which he found to be “top-rated in functionality for the price point.” Over the course of a year, Agiloft worked with EID to customize the solution with complex, multi-threaded workflows, notifications, and escalation rules.

The resulting IT self-service solution now handles roughly 800 cases per quarter. Thanks to its context-specific knowledge base, employees can diagnose and solve issues on their own, leading to the filing of fewer support tickets. They can also create, update, and close tickets. Since status notifications are sent automatically, requesters no longer need to contact the IT department for updates. The system also automatically generates recurring work orders for preventative maintenance work, categorizes and routes cases to IT staff, and provides Key Performance Indicator reporting.

In just one year, phone calls and emails have dropped by 80%, and the average length of time that tickets are open has dropped by 2.5 business days. This has freed up time for IT support staff to handle critical infrastructure projects.

Meanwhile, Ranstrom leverages the system’s reporting to optimize IT performance. “I have recommended Agiloft many times,” he said. “It can be adapted to meet almost any business need. We have gone from the Dark Ages to a modern solution in one fell swoop.”

Read the EID case study: https://www.agiloft.com/eid-case-study.pdf