How automated alerts and unified visibility increase productivity and keep headcount low
In today’s labor market MSPs are looking for ways to scale their operations without having to hire additional techs. For MSPs like ES Consulting, automation and unified systems visibility provide a way to increase productivity without having to hire additional headcount.
The Challenge:
Manual tasks waste the team’s valuable time
Every technician at ES Consulting is considered Tier 3 so the tech who responds to a ticket manages it from start to finish. This superior knowledge base greatly benefits its customers but also requires accurate data, efficient processes and proactive problem solving to remain profitable.
In search of more automation around their documentation and data management, ES Consulting’s President and CEO Dennis Fox and the MSP’s jack-of-all-trades IT Consultant Bill Knox researched Liongard soon after its initial launch. Seeing its potential to automate manual tasks and documentation, and thus improve ticket time-to-resolution for its techs, Knox fell in love with the platform and quickly moved forward with implementation.
“Liongard is the BEST INVESTMENT this company has ever made.”
– Bill Knox
Our Solution:
Automated alerts save time and increase efficiency
Initially, ES Consulting ran every Liongard inspector to detect stale documentation. The Actionable Alerts generated tickets for their engineers, so they could update data and fix previously undetected issues.
Once its existing data had been refreshed and corrected, the ES team continued using Liongard to automate documentation and increase its efficiency. Inspections run across the platform daily which meant the data the engineers needed was always fresh. Instead of having to search manually for issues like unused or duplicate Office 365 licenses, out-of-date security certificates, disabled multi-factor authentication and critical changes, Liongard silently inspects data and sends alerts when it detects issues.
ES Consulting first deployed Liongard to a cross-section of its customers to specifically evaluate the platform’s value for different industries and customer sizes. Fox concluded that there were no vertical limitations to the platform’s capabilities, and said they’ll deploy it for all new customers.
“We would have had to add more bodies to do the same tasks that Liongard automation does for us.”
– Bill Knox
Impact:
$75k/year in cost savings
As early adopters of Liongard automation, ES Consulting has been taking advantage of each addition and improvement Liongard continues to make. “The more we can get software to do for us, the better.”
More automation and increased visibility have led to greater efficiency for its techs and much less time spent on manual tasks, resulting in time and cost savings as well as a higher level of focus on customers.
“Liongard pulls all these issues and brings them to our attention so we can focus on making our customers happy. I can flat-out tell you, it makes my job easier. I spend less time digging for info and more time talking to people,” said Knox.
Though they don’t formally track KPIs, Denis and Bill are confident that day-to-day performance has been significantly impacted by using automation. “We would have had to add more bodies to do the same tasks that Liongard automation does for us,” Fox said, noting that hiring another employee would cost about $75K per year, but without the accuracy they get with Liongard.
“I don’t even know how many man-hours we’re saving each week [using Liongard], but it’s a fairly large sum, I would wager.”
– Bill Knox