Transcript
I'd prefer to have one app that does a hundred things. I'm Jennifer Ellis and I'm the Senior Manager for Service Management and Compliance at the City of Brampton. Responsible for all things service management as well as vendor management, client care, service desk, all sorts of wonderful things. I think one of the biggest challenges in the sector certainly rolls around budget, the RFP processes, some of that procurement activities that we have to do. Private sector, if you have the money, you make the purchase. Public sector, we have to go through the fair and transparent processes. So when I did my RFP looking for my ITSM solution, I didn't focus solely on scoring on price. So price is always something you have to talk about absolutely well, have a budget. It's good to go to one company and say, oh, you've got the best price, but then six months in you find out, you know, they don't have this automation. They don't have, you know, the agents that go out and do the e-discoveries. They don't have a lot of things that you might have been looking for. And I think the difference with Avanti is they do bring the solution that offers the hundred things. You don't have to take them all, but they have them. And they have a full solution that is supported, which is great. It's an end-to-end scenario. Where you get into trouble is when you start doing things like, you know, the front-end piece is one thing, the engine is another, and then the output is a third. And those all have to be integrated together. Integrations, human factors come in there. Errors can happen there. You'd rather have a solution that manages a broader spectrum than you would having 10 solutions that manage the same thing. Avanti offers that solution across the board if you want it. And I think that brings a lot to the table for folks in that service management space. I don't want to manage 200, 400 contracts, right? I want to manage a few large-scale contracts and solutions that actually meet the needs of my business as a whole. We did a service desk modernization over the last five years. We had 12 people answering the phones all day long, taking tickets originally, before we started the modernization. So it was just a service desk. They didn't do much else. So you're level one. And with our modernization, with our partnership with Avanti, I now run with two or three people on the phone and nine or ten people doing other things. So we've been able to take that level two support from the development areas so they can move on and build in that new shiny. And we're doing that support within that client care area. Now we're going to modernize our call centers. But what we're doing with that is we're now going to make life easier for residents of the city, about 800,000 people. So we're going to have to do some integrations with some other applications that support things like enforcement and other areas of the city. So we're going down that avenue of integrations. But so far, I find the integrations with Avanti really easy. They're all API. So API to API. You don't need a third party in the middle to do your integrations and convert it. It's just direct and easy. So we're also doing it on our onboarding process, onboarding, offboarding, where we're integrating with SAP. I guess the main value for me and from my perspective is the partnership that we have. Avanti grows with us. So as our business need grows, Avanti grows. And we have a reseller here in Canada, Confinti. Between Confinti and Avanti, we roadmap. We do a five-year plan. We work towards that five-year plan. Avanti is constantly coming up with new and better. And the last piece of that would be they actually listen. So I've worked with a lot of vendors in my career. And you can go to a vendor and say, look, this is what I really need in the future. And they'll go, yeah, okay. And it'll never happen. With Avanti, they want to have the conversation. They want to sit down with me and say, okay, well, where do you want to be in five years and how do we get there? That's a very different approach when you're working in IT. And those are the partners that you need.
