Category
Customer Service
Procurement
Submitted By
Kelly Smith, Kelly.l.smith@colorado.edu, Director of Student Affairs Business Services
Project Team
Kelly Smith, Kelly.l.smith@colorado.edu, Director of Student Affairs Business Services
Heather Cassell, Heather.Cassell@colorado.edu, Assistant Director of Student Affairs Business Services
Project Description
We created a full-service ticketing system (Jira service desk) to enhance efficiency, transparency and workforce management to support procurement and travel support in the Division of Student Affairs. As a shared service we support departments in procuring and expensing goods and services; arranging and advising travel; and substantiating all expenses. We provide operational expertise in procurement and travel to allow departments to focus on their critical missions. Our service desk centralizes intake of all requests, documents, and communication, provides automated approvals and puts everything in one place accessible by all team members. This enables us to manage our workforce in an ad hoc manner; providing support to areas that need it due to volume and for cross-coverage while staff are out. The service desk provides greater efficiency for our stakeholders in simplifying how requests, documents, and information are submitted and processed and provides them with visibility regarding status.
Project Efficiency
Reduction in the amount of communication and the amount of time saved in locating information are the hallmarks of the service desk. All documentation and communications are kept together and visible to stakeholders and all business services staff. This allows stakeholders to view information about all of their requests in one place without having to dive into email or check multiple systems. The ability to manage our workforce in an ad hoc manner due to the centralization of information has increased the speed of processes and enables us to identify and develop fixes for process gaps.
Project Inspiration
The creation of a shared service supporting 30+ individual departments required finding a solution that would provide efficiencies and benefits to all parties. A service desk serves as a central repository providing a consistent data entry experience with transparency that allows for seamless management of incoming requests including automatic organization and prioritization. The design and implementation required reengineering all business processes from invoice reconciliation to internal expense report reviews to collecting receipts and reporting across multiple departments. We are now able to provide consistency which enhances our abilities to monitor compliance and to enable better decision making.
What Makes You Happiest about this Project?
Staff have reported the system enables them to work better in being more organized and efficient. Management is able to deploy resources during peak teams and for office coverage so we minimize delays and bottlenecks. The data we now have on requests and staff performance is highly beneficial. We average about 1,250 requests/month and the metrics aid in decision making, encourage collaboration in purchasing with other departments and can eliminate unnecessary risks such as monitoring the necessity of PCard usage. We use data to advocate for new master agreements and can establish best practices for being cost conscious and consistent.
