Calculating customer productivity savings

[nottscc]

Hi,

I am the Service Desk manager for a large Local Authority in the UK. The Service Desk is a pilot project that has been running succesfully for just over a year and we are now looking to formalise the team as a permanent function within the IT department.

In support of the formalisation report that will be submitted to Committee, I need to provide evidence of the savings made by our customer departments in terms of their staff productivity, i.e. if an Incident takes down one computer and that member of staff cannot continue to work, what does that cost the department for every hour that user cannot work?

At a basic level we can identify the average hourly pay of a user and the time it takes the Service Desk to resolve the fault, compared to how long the user would have to wait for a fix if the Service Desk was not available and the Incident was simply logged and escalated to 2nd-line field engineers...

However, can anyone advise me if there is an 'industry standard' format for this calculation, or perhaps other methods which give a more accurate value for customer productivity savings?

Any advice appreciated

Thanks

M. Jamison

[walle]

Hi Jamison,

Basically you have two costs:
- Salary for the users who can’t work
- cost for not having a service, i.e. lost sales, lost production

I cant give you a shortcut but before you make your commitment (SLA) you have your customer figure out the cost for not having a service. Nobody knows their business better than themselves (hopefully). While you’re at it, have a little chat about the chances of this service not being available. At my work we call this risk management. This calculation is the reason why the customer needs your services.

Hope this helps.

WD