Kewill ERP Automates Tech Support

Jennifer Kettering knows all about tracking down tough issues.

As Product Support Manager for Kewill ERP, she heads up a busy support team--serving thousands of companies using her firm’s leading ERP product suite called MAX™. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a backbone application that ties together order taking, receiving, production, warehousing, shipping, and accounting for manufacturers. Since an ERP system essentially controls an entire plant, if anything in the system stops working, it’s critical.

"For a lot of customers calling us, it’s mission-critical," says Kettering. "Their profitability is at stake, and their jobs are at stake." The fact that MAX is a highly configurable package that works with many other add-on products adds to her support challenge.

"We support 50 to 60 different products, various database engines, NT or Novell networks. So we expect our support people to be experts in a lot of different products. Plus, we’re dealing with all different levels of knowledge, from entry clerks who don’t know how to use Windows all the way to MIS and high-finance people."

One of Kettering’s toughest challenges happened last summer.

"A customer had installed our system on 50 workstations, but only 2 worked," she recalls. Kewill had devoted a lot of support time, and even sent a consultant on-site, with no success at tracking down the problem.

"We were at the point of asking them to ship one of their workstations to us so we could look at it."

Kewill had just purchased MetaQuest’s Triage, a diagnostic toolset that provides automated technical support. Triage collects all the software and hardware configuration details from a PC to help diagnose installation and configuration issues.

Kettering e-mailed the customer Triage Client and had them run an audit, and e-mail it back. This provided a comprehensive snapshot of one of the customer’s workstations, including system-related information such Windows version and service pack, application-dependent DLL information, registry entries and much more.

The result? "Within two hours, one of our support technicians had figured out the problem: a missing DLL! So Triage saved us thousands of dollars in expenses we would have run up otherwise–-it really paid for itself the first time we used it!" says Jennifer.

After a success like that, Kewill continues to use Triage for what it does best: help make tough support issues a lot easier to troubleshoot.

Kewill’s ERP division notes that 25 percent of its average calls a day concern the customer’s system environment. Within those, when they’ve seen the same issue before and have a quick fix to suggest, they do so.

"And when we run into something that we’ve never seen before, we use Triage," notes Kettering. "Triage can solve something in five minutes that would otherwise turn into a serious situation that could be terribly expensive and frustrating to troubleshoot."

Kewill already sent out Triage to about 100 key customers as part of a Webcast training program. In the future, the company will distribute Triage on their ERP software CD’s, so all their clients can benefit from it.

All in all, Kettering and her team really appreciate the program."Triage is fabulous!" she says. "Our support people really like it. It’s not difficult to learn or use. It’s a really powerful program that is quite intuitive to use–-I’m a fan!"