I don't Code, I Cherwell
February 03, 2017
I don't Code, I Cherwell
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cherwell Service Management
Cherwell SaaS solution replaced our older on-premise ITSM tool (which shall remain nameless!). We did an initial roll-out of only Incident & Service Request and only in two of our regions around the world but have plans to get all IT teams and all main modules of Cherwell deployed. Currently the Cherwell tool is being used to resolve Service requests and is used by IT Support and Escalation groups (Apps, Infrastructure, etc) in support of that objective. Soon we'll build a Customer Portal and take the tool globally.
- Configuration is easy and doesn't require expensive consultants to do every little thing you need to adjust. I'm able to make minor and even major enhancements by myself. I find the development UI mostly intuitive.
- The amount of things we can automate in our Support department using Cherwell is wonderful. We've not yet taken full advantage of this but are excited at the possibilities. From automatically creating and classifying tickets to responding to customers with specific attachments they need, Cherwell is going to help us eliminate wasted time.
- Designing with Blueprints is an intelligent and efficient way to add new functionality to your Cherwell instance without all of the risk. Rollback files make it easy to "undo" any mistakes. This also allows you to develop in one environment and apply your Blueprints to the Production environment once fully tested.
- During my time working on the Cherwell implementation and subsequent modifications, I've noticed some 'out of the box bugs' that I'd like to see corrected in future versions of Cherwell. Some are simple oversights. Examples include leaving the Last Name out of the default Grid for the Customer table and some issues with the SLA date fields being set correctly in some cases.
- Cherwell really needs a distributed data center model so global customers can run a single SaaS instance and whose remote teams can connect to their nearest Cherwell server. Our teams in France and the USA currently connect to one Cherwell server in the UK and the performance/latency for our folks furthest away from the server could be better.
- The documentation could certainly be expanded upon. It does a good job explaining what everything is but doesn't go into enough detail to help you understand how to use it. Examples could be included at the bottom to help readers understand the content and how to apply it.
- Having a single SaaS instance of Cherwell has allowed our organization for the first time seamlessly transfer tickets across regions and allow for unprecedented communication between our groups. We look forward to opening the tool to all global IT teams and incorporating all major modules (Problem, Change, CI & Knowledge and more!) where we'll finally all be on the same tool and various IT data will finally all be in a relational database.
- Ongoing costs can be lowered because we now have enough in-house expertise to manage most of our routine Cherwell modifications and management.
- Once Cherwell is fully implemented at our organization, we'll be able to do with several separate systems and databases where all IT information is currently stored which will make things more simple and cost-effective to maintain.
We looked at ServiceNow but it was too expensive for our needs.
We then looked at RemedyForce because one region had recently implemented it.
We settled on Cherwell because of its placement within the Gartner quadrant and its ease of configuration and flexibility and great price.
We then looked at RemedyForce because one region had recently implemented it.
We settled on Cherwell because of its placement within the Gartner quadrant and its ease of configuration and flexibility and great price.