Hi all,

May I ask the other users how you treat your Third party contact info within HMP? That is, do you have SITE records for each vendor/external escalation point/service provider, or do you have these details as a knowledgebase article?

cheers,

aprill

I think we will end up doing a bit of a mix of the two. Obviously the contacts pertaining to assets and operating environments should be Sites. We have a few other random things like security guards/camera security that are more about building management. Currently it's a record in the KB. Perhaps it should be moved to the extra info in the Site record for the building/site concerned, now that I think more about it.

Yes, this is one way of achieving this. Basically you'd be linking multiple clients to the same job, and then changing the primary client to reflect where the job is.

Here's another way that might work.

1. Create a new staff member, or even skillgroup (or both) that represents the vendor
2. When the job is escalated, assign the job to that staff member, or skillgroup. At this stage it may also be helpful to change the status of the job to something like "Awaiting vendor reply", or "Vendor action" etc.
3. When the job is finished with the vendor, re-assign it back to your internal staff member for further action.

Another way might be to create a unique job status that relates to each unique vendor and change the status of the job to reflect this.

Personally, I like the Staff member/Skillgroup option for the following reasons.

1. It physically moves the job into another job queue which makes it easier to see what each staff member has, and what each vendor has
2. It allows you to create Priority Manager profiles that target that staff member / skillgroup to perform additional escation work such as email reminders, or "Hey, what's happinging to that job - you've had it now for x weeks!"
3. It allows a finer level of reporting.
4. it also allows your vendors to start using the HelpMaster Pro web interface to receive work, update their job and re-assign it back once finished.

This method does have drawback if you have lots of vendors. You can end up having a lot of "Staff members".

Anyway, that's just a few ideas off the top of my head. I hope it's useful.

Best regards,

Rod

We don't have many vendors that we regularly escalate to so I like your idea with the Staff Member representation. Thanks  for the input.

This is how we have it setup. -Vendors

- Vendors are staff members. This is so its easier to assign requests. Job status is set to waiting for vendor.

- External requests are set as job type repair/service, normally jobs are classified as incidents. This is do we don't get emails bugging us that the job is not completed within client chosen SLA. We advise internal clients that once it goes outside our organisation its an SLA exception.

- We have a priority manager schedule that runs every few minutes and assign's vendor tickets back to service desk. This prevents clients replying to the job and going "Whinge, this is taking too long" than having that message sent to the vendor.

- We than add the vendor name in a custom field description

- Add the vendor reference to a custom field "VendorRef"

- Create a saved search "Random Vendor" - all jobs open that looks for the vendor name in the custom field description.

For other jobs send to suppliers IE. purchase requests

- The clients are staff members only

- Requests are assigned to a supplier and left there

- If after 14 days the job is open and we haven't been advised of a stock shortage it will send an email to the supplier asking for delivery ETA. If they have advised us of a delay we place the job status as on hold and no furthur emails will be received by the vendor.

- Once the equipment arrives we add a note to the request saying the equipment was received and change the status to waiting for invoice. A priority Manager schedule with than run saying equipment arrived please send invoice. And it will keep asking for the invoice every 7 days until we receive it and close the request indicating the bill has been paid.