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How BUCS IT Reduced Their IT Service Billing Preparation Times by 92% and Gained Key Insights Into their Managed Services
In this case study, we take a look at how leading managed service provider, BUCS IT, implemented Servicely to take their service delivery to the next level and create a new foundation to support long term growth.
About BUCS IT
BUCS IT is a leading IT Managed Services Provider (MSP) based in Wuppertal, Germany, delivering full-stack IT operations services, including cloud and cybersecurity. BUCS IT take a pragmatic and consultative approach to working with their clients, focusing on delivering IT services designed to help their clients and make work easier for end-users.
The Challenge
After nearly 20 years of using its IT Service Management platform, BUCS IT connected with Servicely to upgrade to a more flexible and future-ready platform that could support their long-term growth ambitions. While BUCS IT had customised their current platform to meet complex requirements and deliver fast, professional IT services to their customers, the platform had started to show its age and lacked the configurability and extensibility they needed.
As an MSP, BUCS IT require an ITSM platform that they can utilise less traditionally – it needs to be a hybrid Customer Service Management (CSM) and ITSM solution. This use case required multi-tenancy capabilities, with separate customer instances containing their own CMDB, knowledge base, and integrations with key systems like Azure and Microsoft Intune. These customer tenants had to remain independent but provide centralised visibility to the assigned team and BUCS IT management.
While searching for a new ITSM platform, BUCS found that most couldn’t handle their contract and billing requirements. Customers had unique contracts that specified the services provided, the service rates, and whether a service was chargeable or included under their managed services fee. This could vary between different end-users within a customer account. BUCS IT needed to keep comprehensive timecards for work completed at the ticket level and aggregate this data to create detailed invoices. This was an extremely manual process, with each team leader having to set aside 2 days per month for billing analysis and preparation.
BUCS IT were also seeking to resolve a lack of visibility, as their existing platform was limited in what data points they could report on and analyse, especially when it came to timecards and the cost of delivering services. This left BUCS IT unable to determine which services were unprofitable, hindering their ability to make strategic decisions around pricing and service offerings. Identifying the manual tasks and processes that were taking up the most time for the service teams was also impossible, leaving BUCS IT questioning what processes should be automated and where they should be focussing on training or up-skilling
The Solution
Leveraging the infinitely flexible nature of Servicely, we worked with BUCS IT to configure their MSP-focussed service management deployment with a hybrid IT Service Management (ITSM) & Customer Service Management (CSM) solution tightly interwoven with field services, contract management, SLA and time tracking functionality.
BUCS IT had well-established, mature IT service processes, having borne the development responsibility of much of the bespoke functionality of their previous ITSM platform. This made the core service management migration a familiar foundation with some strategic upgrades –including automatic ticket creation and routing from emails received, creation of a customer portal, ability to create work orders for field services, and integrations with key systems like Microsoft Intune, Azure and endpoint protection tools.
The multi-tenancy structure was configured to provide appropriate visibility and permissions for customers, service teams and management. Integrations and an independent Configuration Management Database (CMDB) were set up for each customer tenant, enabling the team to make informed changes and identify problems with ease. Contract rules are established at the customer level and the knowledge base supports customer-specific articles. Each service team has visibility over all their customer tenancies, with BUCS IT management given complete visibility,
Servicely and BUCS IT worked together to deploy and uplift the time tracking and billing functionality. New incident or ticket creation automatically assigns the correct contract terms and SLAs, identifying whether a ticket is covered under a managed service agreement (MSA) or chargeable. At the end of a billing period, a billing appendix is automatically generated, giving a detailed breakdown of charges, and the service agent timecards logged against each ticket.
The Results
Moving its IT service management to Servicely has set up BUCS IT with a platform that supports their long-term growth. Servicely’s modern features and configurability have provided the flexibility that was missing, enabling BUCS IT to tailor the platform to their needs, automate manual tasks and enhance their service delivery.
Visibility has dramatically increased, and the management team are better positioned to make strategic decisions around processes to automate and the profitability of service lines. The multi-tenancy functionality with customer-specific integrations has provided clear delineation and better visibility into customer environments, making it easier for service teams to diagnose and resolve incidents and problems.
The change to time tracking and billing has been transformative, cutting the time to assess chargeable tickets and prepare invoices by 92% - cutdown from the original 2 days per team lead per month on the previous system. Timecard and ticket information is aggregated into a billing appendix and attached to the customer’s invoice via integration with BUCS IT's ERP, giving customers a complete record of work completed.
The experience for BUCS IT service agents is much more user-friendly, with the simpler timecard logging reducing the time taken to log their work by 60%. And, with customer emails automatically creating or updating tickets, ticket routing and classification is twice as fast.
BUCS IT was already delivering mature, response IT service before Servicely, and they’re continuing to do so with the change – at an elevated level of productivity. The team at BUCS are continuing to build upon this new foundation and are looking forward to switching on Servicely’s AI features to further empower their team and evolve the way they deliver IT service.
“I am delighted that we can take the next step in the further development of our company with Servicely. We have found a strong and completely flexible platform to take our ITSM and ESM to a whole new level. We are confident that with servicely we will be able to achieve our vision for our enterprise platform. I am grateful for the good, cooperative partnership and for their product vision."
- Roland Gemmert
Head of Business Development Systems, BUCS IT
Key Stats
200%
Faster incident classification and routing
92%
Reduction in service billing preparation time
60%
Reduction in timecard logging time
100%
Visibility over service bottlenecks and service line profitability
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