New helpdesk system creates greater visibility on IT change projects

Budget airline carrier Ryanair has achieved 99 per cent user satisfaction with its IT helpdesk after implementing an internal service desk management system.

The helpdesk system was rolled out across Ryanair’s 135 European locations supporting more than 1,000 users.

The key benefit of the Footprints system, supplied by software firm Numara, is having a clear, visible central system for assessing IT problems, said Ryanair IT director Eric Neville

“The system records every email interaction and all historical information on a query and even if an email is sent to a third-party supplier the correspondence is still captured,” he said.

Of the 500 queries a week the airline’s 22 IT staff deal with, almost all are resolved to a satisfactory level after the new system was implemented, said Neville.

“We run weekly reports and measure satisfaction levels which are amazing considering we have 22 staff to run the IT department of a £2bn-revenue company with 135 locations,” he said.

Queries are resolved faster with the new system’s historical information and dropdown menus which allow faster processing.

Ryanair had an in-house system previously which did not offer the kind of visibility the new system has, said Neville.

The system, rolled out in May, is a workflow application which, in theory, could be used across the whole company.

Footprint was initially used as a helpdesk system within Ryanair, but the company will also be using it for IT project management.

“We need a clear audit trail for IT change projects to comply as Ryanair is listed on the Nasdaq and is subject to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance,” said Neville.