Polaris Revs Up FootPrints for Help Desk Automation

Published: August 1, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Polaris Industries, the $1.9 billion snowmobile manufacturer, recently implemented a help desk solution from Unipress Software that allowed it to automate the handling of IT support issues concerning its network, programming, security, purchasing, and OS/400 environment, as well as the streamlining its regulatory compliance reporting.

Laurie Brueggeman, LAN administrator for Medina, Minnesota-based Polaris, explains the company's help desk requirements. "We desired a centralized help desk solution that would allow us to provide instant and thorough IT support to our employees, no matter where they are physically located," she says. "We also required powerful e-mail routing and seamless WAN compatibility, so communication across multiple locations would be instantaneous and accurate. Finally, we needed the solution to be easy for us to manage and flexible enough to meet our needs as the new IT help desk evolved."

Polaris considered several help desk products during its search, which began in 2003. However, many of the products were considered too expensive and not flexible enough, which led the company to consider writing its own help desk product.

However, when Brueggeman discovered the Windows-based FootPrints offering from Unipress Software of New Jersey, she found it a good fit. Three features stood out above the rest, including Web-based functionality, its e-mail notification capabilities, and overall ease of use.

FootPrints' e-mail routing was of particular importance. "In our previous experience with other products, e-mail was hit or miss, meaning sometimes email notification worked and other times it didn't. FootPrints worked from day one, and we have never had a problem with e-mail routing," Brueggeman says.

Today, Polaris' 73-person IT help desk uses FootPrints on a daily basis to generate compliance reports and to track requests to the Polaris IT department, including tracking ticket volumes, open versus closed tickets ratio, average ticket-resolution times, and agent performance metrics. More than 30,000 service and support requests were handled within the first year of implementing FootPrints, and now the company is averaging 2,750 requests per month.

Footprints has made the company more productive, Brueggeman says. "Having FootPrints has unified the group in terms of business processes. Different items that our agents are working on are now more visible to the entire group across multiple locations, and agents can assist each other with common tasks," she says.

In addition to compliance reports and IS help desk and agent tracking, Polaris has also found uses for the software in other areas, including a PC hardware request application, as well as an error tracking program that identifies which areas of application code have failed.