Web-Based Help Desk & Incident Management System

Abstract

Every organization which delivers products or services has the need of a help desk system to solve the questions and error reports that comes from the users. A web based help desk system makes it possible to automate the entire end-to-end service requests and resolution process in order to provide faster and uninterrupted service. Hayleys Advantis (Pvt) Ltd is a holding company which is providing comprehensive and integrated logistics solutions to local and international clients. There are about 30 subsidiaries located under Hayleys Advantis and all IT related operations are handled by a centralized IT team. Currently the IT team manages all helpdesk related activities and support requests manually. They require technical people to answer phone calls and to log problems manually. This manual process is inefficient and may cause delays due to unavailability of technical staff to answer the phone calls. Presently there is no any tracking system designed for the management to get statistics of the help desk matters and to measure the overall performance. The main aim of this project was todevelop a web based help desk and incident management system for Hayleys Advantis to streamline their IT operations.

The proposed system was developed in module wise with different functions and integrated with each other to perform the overall functionality. A prototype was developed to check the system functionality and user-friendliness of the system. The final system was tested and evaluated by different levels of users and acquired the accepted feedback which has been provided by the customer.

The implemented help desk system makes it possible for the end users to submit service requests directly into the system. The problem is automatically assigned to the relevant engineer. Once the problem is resolved, the solution is stored for future reference if a similar problem occurs at a later time which benefits in much faster response time for end users. This help desk system creates a history record on the service requests that are stored in the system, this way it is possible to get statistics to measure the performances in different aspects of the system.

Due to the rapid progress in technology in the business organizations, help desk systems have become an important tool in the development of problem solving technology. Hayleys Advantis is greatly benefited from using this system by handling help desk activities in a structured manner.