The IT team supports registered users based across five sites - the main office in Sevenoaks, the Direct Services Department, the ranger’s offices and two local offices in Swanley and Edenbridge. The team also provides a Service Desk facility to 54 councillors who use laptops, some working on broadband at home. Since implementing Supportworks the IT team has noted a 100% increase in calls handled, whilst continuing to meet performance targets set out in its Service Level Agreements.

Hornbill was selected from three short-listed helpdesk products as the best 'out of the box solution', being both intuitive and easy to use. The 10-strong Service Desk team at Sevenoaks District Council is split into support engineers who use the system constantly, front line and back office support. The team also has a GIS Manager and engineer.

More recently the support team has also taken over support for the land line and mobile telephones in addition to all IT hardware and software, including PDAs, printers, modems and fax machines. All support calls and email requests to the helpdesk are now logged in Supportworks and assigned a priority. The user is sent an email when the call is accepted by a support operative and kept informed of progress.

All calls are prioritised and a traffic light system provides an 'at a glance' summary of outstanding calls that need immediate attention.

A web self-service helpdesk option has also been recently introduced which enables customers to log an incident, track their call, and see when it has been resolved via the Council's intranet.

The IT team also uses the call logging and reporting for planning resources and staff requests. Mike Williams, Technical Support Engineer at Sevenoaks District Council: "Supportworks has made a positive difference to the way our helpdesk operates. It was up-and-running very quickly and is simple to use so we didn’t have to spend lots of time and resources at the implementation stage. Importantly it has helped to make the service even more efficient than before, which benefits our staff and ultimately our most important customers, our residents."

"The system has been further enhanced by product updates over the last two years since Supportworks first went live." he added.

Gerry Sweeney, Managing Director at Hornbill Systems commented, "For public serving organisations like Sevenoaks District Council supporting the community is a top priority. It is paramount that staff providing support to their community are able to focus on their job rather than the tools and infrastructure they need to do their job. The Supportworks helpdesk solution makes complicated tasks easy to carry out ensuring that its users are more productive and focused on their work. By leaving the details of process, workflow and SLAs to Supportworks, the support team are able to focus their efforts on their customers, improving efficiency and cost effectiveness, really important issues when spending public money."