The Ahfad University for Women provides professional IT support to staff members via OTRS.

The AUW recently introduced a new integrated application system, causing an increased need for professional support from the IT department. The result: very long resolution times, unsatisfied customers and countless unanswered inquiries that the university’s overloaded IT department was no longer able to cope with.

“We were looking for an IT service management solution that would be easy to use and implement in order to support our IT department,” says Hozifa Hussein, AUWs Data Center Manager. Of course, OTRS can also do much more: OTRS enables the university to generate a wide range of reports based on customized criteria, giving AUW management a complete overview of each department’s performance at any point in time. The multi-language support has also proven to be a very helpful function of OTRS, making it possible for AUW management to work with both English and Arabic.

It wasn’t easy to find an ITSM solution meeting all of the university’s IT service management needs for an acceptable price. The software would not only have to support the IT department, but also other areas such as facilities management, and as the University Education System is used for student accounting and library management, complete integration with existing systems was a must. Furthermore, it had to be possible to manage additional third party applications. The fact that OTRS is based on the ITIL v3 framework is — together with the low costs — one of the many advantages the AUW is grateful for. As Hozifa Hussein concludes: “The drop in complaints shows that we made the right decision by choosing OTRS. We increased end-user satisfaction through shorter resolution times and an improved IT service management.”