Not Perfect but the Most Complete Solution
April 13, 2016

Not Perfect but the Most Complete Solution

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite

BMC Remedy ITSM is used by the company which provides IT outsourcing to over 100 companies. All ticketing is done in Remedy for incidents, change requests, and service requests. Company and some customer assets are managed in Remedy. Service level management is used to monitor and manage contractual service agreements. By leveraging a mature common system, the company is able to leverage shared resources to support multiple customers.

Pros

  • Change Management - built in processes align tightly with ITIL while allowing company-level flexibility. For example, while a 'multi-tenant' model is used on a shared Remedy instance, each company can have its own approval requirements.
  • Incident Management - Data driven assignment rules working with categorization and location/department information assure the incident is assigned properly with automation.
  • Service Level Management - It is easy to create rules via a console that are based on any data in an incident, change, service request, task, etc. You are not limited to a few fields to drive your SLAs or OLAs.
  • Smart IT - with the new Smart IT interface the information is brought to the support user vs. having to search for it. Type in a few key words and Smart IT suggests incident templates, service request templates and knowledge solutions to choose from.

Cons

  • Smart IT needs to continue to mature in order to become "the" tool for all interactions by a support user. There are still some areas where a power user has to revert to the mid-tier tool.
  • CMDB is not fully multi-tenant or multi-language utilization in the data that drives it. A product can only be listed in one language and have one categorization. This is an issue if a customer has multi-national locations and employees in each only speak their native language. There is no auto-translation of the categorization of the product in the product catalog. Additionally, some companies want to follow the categorization as found in their discovery tool. Not all discovery tools or manual entries are agreed by all companies. This causes uniqueness issues in a multi-tenant environment.
  • Reduced call handing time by using the Smart IT Smart recorder. Because of the suggested templates and knowledge articles there has been an increased efficiency vs having to either jump out of the ticket and look for knowledge articles or find the right template to use.
  • Increase first call resolution due to the knowledge suggestion feature.
  • Ability to leverage a shared set of IT Technicians to support multiple customers because of the use of the shared Remedy system. Yet, customers can only see their data maintaining data privacy across customer companies.
I have evaluated ServiceNow.

Remedy was far superior in completeness of predefined workflow. There was a lot that would have had to be built to assure company standards were followed, that reporting would be meaningful and ITIL process was followed to the level required.


Both Remedy and ServiceNow have the capability to build your own forms or workflow. It seems to be a toss up on which way you would want to do these modification. Both seem to have issues with upgrade to some degree if you've done customization/modification. It seems Remedy has a slight edge due to the tools they have built to help the customer decide if they should keep their customization/modification when they upgrade or if Remedy has done a similar change that the customer can use instead.

BMC Remedy ITSM is well suited to medium to large companies but may be overkill for a small company with little process required. It is well suited for a company that has good process or wants to grow in to processes by turning on features over time. I've worked with many companies that began with using just Incident Management then grew in to Service Level Management, Service Request Management, Change Management, Asset Management and Knowledge Management over time. The commonality of how you configure or add capabilities makes it easy to 'grow as you go' by turning on features. If a customer needs something extra or different, it is pretty straightforward to add fields or functions or even add new forms altogether.

BMC Helix ITSM Feature Ratings

Incident and problem management
8.4
Organize and prioritize service tickets
10
Expert directory
8
Service restoration
10
Self-service tools
8
Subscription-based notifications
7
ITSM collaboration and documentation
7
ITSM reports and dashboards
9
ITSM asset management
7.0
Configuration mangement
8
Asset management dashboard
7
Policy and contract enforcement
6
Change management
8.7
Change requests repository
10
Change calendar
6
Service-level management
10

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