Nimsoft Service Desk provides a user-friendly interface, configuration flexibility, and increased visibility to simplify and streamline service desk activities and enable faster incident resolution. To read more case studies, visit: http://nimsoft.com/customers/case-studies.html

1. Virginia Farm Bureau
Virginia Farm Bureau Reaps Rewards with Nimsoft Service Desk
SaaS Delivery Model and Easy-to-Use Interface Prove
Challenge
Fruitful for Bureau’s IT Staff
Implement an easy-to-deploy and
Background
use solution for automating ticketing
and service desk processes. Virginia Farm Bureau Federation is a non-governmental, nonpartisan, voluntary
organization committed to protecting Virginia’s farms and providing a safe, fresh
and locally grown food supply. With more than 150,000 members in 88 county
Farm Bureaus, it is Virginia’s largest farmers’ advocacy group, working to support
Solution its producer members through legislative lobbying, leadership development
programs, commodity associations, rural health programs, agricultural supplies
Nimsoft Service Desk provides a and marketing, and other services. In addition to the federation, the VFBF
user-friendly interface, configuration maintains 16 different businesses, including a full line of commercial and personal
flexibility, and increased visibility to insurance products.
simplify and streamline service desk
activities and enable faster incident Challenge
resolution. With so many members and customers involved with the various commercial
businesses, the VFBF must keep its IT infrastructure running optimally at all times.
System availability is of paramount importance to maintaining customer service
levels, so the ability to process and resolve service issues is critical.
Results
The VFBF’s IT organization had been relying on manual processes for much of its
∞ Increased ticket tracking, ticketing and compliance tasks. Although CA Service Desk Manager was installed
troubleshooting and resolution on-site, extensive consulting services would have been necessary to get the
effectiveness. current version of the 12 complex modules of the solution up and running in the
∞ Improved productivity by environment. It was a very robust, complete solution; however, maintaining it
eliminating manual processes would have stretched the VFBF’s limited IT budget beyond its constraints.
associated with creating and
The team began evaluating other service desk tools to find one that was more
resolving trouble tickets.
suitable to the needs of the organization. CA introduced the team to Nimsoft
∞ Reduced infrastructure and Service Desk, a SaaS-based solution that provides the attractive features of CA
management overhead with Service Desk but was more affordable, and easier to implement and manage.
remotely managed SaaS solution. “We’d had good experiences with CA and trusted their recommendation—Nimsoft
∞ Improved audit accuracy and had all the features we needed,” said Steve Villalpando, Manager of IT Governance
significantly reduced audit costs. and Service Delivery, Virginia Farm Bureau Federation.
Solution
Nimsoft Service Desk is a SaaS solution with built-in ITIL®-based best practices
and the ability to adapt the workflow to the specific needs of the business in
a low cost, easily upgraded way. The flexible, configurable solution can be

2. Nimsoft Case Study
tailored to the specific needs of the business without the of creation. Even e-mail requests can be routed based on text
cost and complexity associated with traditional code-based embedded in the subject line or other aspects of the message.
customization, helping companies quickly gain value.
“Everything comes to the service desk as a request, whether
The VFBF found the solution easy to deploy and quickly it’s a request for new functionality or to fix something,” said
get users up and running and appreciated its user-friendly Villalpando. “We triage the request in the tool and create an
interface, configuration flexibility, and the increased visibility incident or request record, then assign it to the appropriate
provided by the dashboards. group for processing.”
“With Nimsoft, we can quickly The ITIL-based Incident
respond to changes,” said Management module with pre-
Villalpando. “The solution is
“With Nimsoft Service Desk, we packaged workflows make it easy
easy to re-configure on the fly— can rapidly respond to changes to identify, register, prioritize,
without scripting—and new users in our computing environment categorize, and track incidents
can become productive without or our IT service portfolio. It is reported to the service desk. These
extensive training.” pre-packaged solutions leverage
also very easy to re-configure— advanced service management
After implementation, demand on the fly, without scripting—so techniques to effectively manage
for the tool was so high that
new users can become productive the entire lifecycle of an incident,
Villalpando had to add more
without extensive training.” from detection through closure.
licenses. “Prior to Nimsoft our
Templates and action-based
IT managers had no visibility into
—Steve Villalpando workflows help confirm correct
the ticketing processes,” he said.
Manager of IT Governance and Service Delivery processes are followed and
“Because Nimsoft Service Desk
Virginia Farm Bureau Federation eliminate the need for extensive
enables them to easily view the
training or hiring of highly skilled
activity and status of all tickets
technicians.
assigned to their individual
groups, there is much higher demand for the tool than we “Nimsoft enables us to keep an inventory of everything in the
expected.” IT infrastructure, so our support team can quickly identify
the root cause of an incident, zero in on the affected device,
Connecting the Dots: Request, Incident and effectively troubleshoot,” said Villalpando. “Being able
and Change Management to pinpoint a problem leads to much faster resolution, and
Villalpando’s team leverages the Request and Incident increases service availability.”
modules to improve the consistency and quality of service
Nimsoft Service Desk also enables Villalpando’s team to
by applying service levels to the fulfillment process, while
keep a complete audit trail of all ticketing processes, which
reducing costs through self-service and automation features.
simplifies compliance activities and increases accuracy.
Clear communication with end users leads to increased
customer service, as well. “Prior to installing Nimsoft, our technicians would close the
ticket when service was restored, and information about
The Service Catalog module provides ticket templates so
changes to the infrastructure was not linked to the incident
users can easily enter requests. The templates pre-populate
record,” said Villalpando. “With the Nimsoft Service Desk
the required information to speed turnaround times. After a
Problem Management module, our technicians can directly
user enters a request, the Request Management module uses
create a change request according to what’s in the problem
the built-in, configurable workflow engine to automatically
record, which helps us maintain a complete audit trail that
route all tickets to the appropriate group or technician, based
includes changes made to the infrastructure as a result of the
on a combination of the information in the request or the time
incident.”
2 | Case Study: Virginia Farm Bureau

3. Nimsoft Case Study
Results associated with system management, patches and updates.
“Nimsoft is managed completely off-site, which is a big plus,”
VFBF is realizing numerous benefits from the Nimsoft Service
said Villalpando. “We don’t have to spend money on operating
Desk implementation. Through automation, the solution has
onsite infrastructure, and we save on storage and cooling
eliminated most of the manual labor previously required to
costs, as well.”
create, investigate, troubleshoot and close tickets, increasing
visibility into the ticketing process and streamlining audit With its advanced reporting features, Nimsoft Service Desk
activities. can further reduce costs by decreasing the amount of
time and resources allocated to completing audits. Prior to
“We don’t need highly skilled technicians to troubleshoot
Nimsoft, the VFBF team spent hours helping auditors with
and resolve tickets,” said Villalpando. “Nimsoft is intuitive and
on-site manual audits, because certain systems were deemed
easy to use with built-in self-service features that enable end
“not reliable” in terms of their ability to produce accurate data
users to fix a lot of things on their own. Reducing the amount
about the infrastructure.
of support we need to provide and increasing our ability to
quickly troubleshoot and fix problems, will save a lot of money “With Nimsoft, all the information is there, and we can quickly
down the road.” generate a report that satisfies compliance requirements,”
said Villalpando. “By automating and streamlining this process,
Delivered as a SaaS offering, Nimsoft Service Desk minimizes
Nimsoft slashes our audit costs by about 50%.”
infrastructure overhead and reduces the operational costs
About Nimsoft
Nimsoft provides leading IT Management-as-a-Service solutions within the CA Technologies portfolio. Companies and service
providers of all sizes use Nimsoft to rapidly and easily implement essential monitoring and service desk capabilities necessary to
manage today’s dynamic computing environments. Learn more at www.nimsoft.com.
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