Carver County Saves Money and Time with Provance ServiceTeam and Dell Premier Program Integration

“Although our decision to deploy the ServiceTeam ITSM and ServiceTeam ITAM Power Apps was primarily a financial decision, we were immediately impressed by the simplified user face,” said Justin Rootes, IT Support Technician Supervisor at Carver County. “From a cost and ease-of-use perspective, everything got better.”

The Time Before

Carver County started their ITSM journey with our legacy product, and in 2022, they decided to transition to ServiceTeam ITSM and ITAM.

“As a municipality, we’re always budget conscious, and at the time, it made financial sense to switch to the new products because they leveraged the Microsoft Power Platform—which we were already familiar with—and licensing was better for us,” said Chad Riley, Enterprise Software Services Manager for Carver County. “Plus, this was the way the Microsoft ecosystem was moving, so it was good timing for us.”

Carver County also had never had an ITAM solution before, as they had been handling everything manually, with no asset tracking, reporting, or automation.

“We were also considering implementing asset management, and when we found out that there was an add-in available, it was the most cost-effective and logical choice to opt for ServiceTeam ITAM,” said Rootes. “We can now track an asset throughout its entire lifecycle and access all sorts of reporting we never had before.”

One of the other main reasons they chose ServiceTeam ITAM was its integration with Microsoft Intune.

“At that time, we were exploring Intune, and we could see early on that we could leverage the integration to transfer assets into ServiceTeam ITAM, and then when we heard about the Dell Premier Account API integration Beta, we willingly signed up to be their test subjects,” said Riley. “All that automation would be a huge time saver for us.”

On the Roadmap

Provance understood the challenges faced by its customers who are members of the Dell Premier program, and that’s why the company prioritized integrating this program into its product roadmap.

“One of the guiding principles we tell our customers about ITAM is that you should use procurement records and not just rely on discovery data to understand the what, where and how many assets you have,“ said Roger Labelle, Director of Product Management at Provance. “If there’s a discrepancy, you’ll know if assets are missing or if, perhaps, people are using their personal assets and putting the organization at risk.”

Asset managers usually compile asset information, including asset details, orders, delivery and warranty information, into an Excel spreadsheet and then import the data into ServiceTeam ITAM. Then, they must refer back to the supplier to manually update the status.

Dell has its own API, through which Dell Premier account holders access a customized online platform for ordering and purchasing assets.

“Even though it was easy to order assets in the Dell Premier account API, other aspects of the process were quite resource-intensive,” said Rootes. “Not only do I have to manually check the various Dell portals for information depending on the lifecycle of the order, I have to manually create, upload and add that information into ServiceTeam ITAM—it’s an incredible amount of time sucked from my day when we’ve made large orders.”

“We like to empower our customers by providing tools that help them run their organization faster and more efficiently, and so it made sense to build an out-of-the-box integration to the Dell Premier account API and build the capability for ServiceTeam ITAM to automatically pull asset information as soon as Dell publishes it—saving our customers time,” said Labelle.

The Final Stage

Provance, Carver County and Dell worked together to make the integration a reality. All a customer needs is a PO or invoice number. ServiceTeam ITAM takes care of the rest—automatically creating all the assets and then importing order, warranty and delivery information as the order goes through its lifecycle.

“This has been a real productivity gain for us,“ said Rootes. “I’d estimate we cut my time managing asset orders by 80%. All the information we need is right at our fingertips. No longer do I have to manually copy the information from Dell into a template and then upload.”

ServiceTeam ITAM collects all asset information, shipping details, and warranty information, so asset managers now know the what, where, and when of their recent Dell orders. They now have accurate information at all times.

“The Dell Premier program integration is just one of the many ways that we experienced great productivity gains since implementing ServiceTeam ITSM and ServiceTeam ITAM,” said Rootes. “Although it was a financial decision at first, we’ve been thrilled with all the time-saving capabilities, which at the end of the day saves us money too.”

The End Result

Since they rolled out ServiceTeam ITSM and ServiceTeam ITAM, the team at Carver County have experienced a dramatic improvement in reporting. They now have access to valuable metrics that were previously unavailable, and they can now analyze historical data and identify key trends, which would have been completely invisible before.

“We mostly leveraged the out-of-the-box dashboards with some enhancing specifically for our needs,” said Rootes. “Before, we made a lot of assumptions without having concrete facts; now we have all the data in front of us, and we can look at trends, too.”

The adoption of ServiceTeam ITSM and ServiceTeam ITAM has also been relatively seamless.

“Overall, the transition went quite smoothly and since we implemented, we’ve been through a couple of upgrades which haven’t caused any hiccups,” said Riley. “I mean, there’s always little quirks here and there, but when they’ve cropped up, it’s been easy to resolve those issues.”

“And we’ve enjoyed working with the Provance team,” Rootes added. “They are very responsive, very helpful and we work well together. Overall, ServiceTeam ITSM and ServiceTeam ITAM have been transformative for our operations, in particular, the Dell integration has been a game-changer, slashing my time spent managing orders by an incredible 80%. Really, we couldn’t be more pleased with the results.”