Part 1 – Automating service with the BMC Remedy Email Engine

I (along with others) just finished an initiative at a customer site.  This mini-project was part of a larger implementation.  The entire goal was to create an interface that allowed the following to happen:

1. Allow customer inbound emails to create an Incident in Remedy Incident Management 7.x
2. Respond to customer case-creation emails with a standard template that listed further information the customer should provide, and
3. Allow replies to the notification email to update the Incident

None of this is very difficult of course but before I get into a technical discussion about this it is worth noting WHY this is worth doing.

It’s plainly obvious that automation of any manual process is a good idea.  It removes mistakes, ensures consistency, and generally – and most importantly – saves money. 

In  this case all of these things are true.  And we can actually quite easily show the ROI from performing these relatively simple improvements.

For this customer I know that two people were working full time every day processing emails.  They were both full time, so that is 80 hours/week or approximately 4000 hours/year.

I have no idea what the staff in question are paid but I am aware of industry averages for similar positions.  For the same of simplicity let’s estimate they cost the company about $30/hr ($22/hr + payroll, insurance, etc…).  So the total cost of the work they performed is approximately $120,000 per year total.

If you total the coding, testing, training, etc time we spent on this project we are far, far under that amount.  In fact I don’t believe we even hit 100 hours.  Our internal pricing is pretty competative but even on the open market this project makes sense – you have immediate ROI and consistent delivery.

In short – just this one small project is going to save over $100,000 this year and improve service delivery.

There are some straightforward design considerations to talk through as well – you can find that in part two.

-William Rentfrow, Principal Consultant, StrataCom Inc