Great Process Builder
Updated February 15, 2017

Great Process Builder

Michael J Mandeville | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cherwell Service Management

Cherwell is used by the Information Technology department at Calvin College as our Information Technology Service Management tool. At this point, Calvin Information Technology is the sole user of the software, but there are plans to expand the usage across the organization in the future. Cherwell replaced our outdated solution we had been using that was hampering our communication and causing many process mis-steps.
  • Offers a great ITIL framework out of the box
  • Allows for a lot of customization and hooks into other software
  • Sets up an out-of-the-box process for a ticket lifecycle if you don't have a process already set
  • Creating and running reports is ridiculously, impossibly complex and complicated
  • The product is so open-ended it's almost too broad. We have ended up creating a lot of in-house customizations to the product that would have been nice to have out of the box.
  • Dashboards are great to have but they are awful in implementation. They are not dynamic and act more like a Bitmap file made in Windows 95 Microsoft Paint than a dynamic webpage. It would be nice if Dashboards were dynamic and were more like HTML or a web-based platform. It doesn't make sense why web design products like WIX exist yet the dashboards are needlessly complicated and have static image borders, sizes, etc.
  • Our process has benefited from a more rigid framework
  • Our communication on tickets between team members and inter-departmental has improved
  • Our entire User Process onboarding/offboarding process has been informed by Cherwell
  • We actually have a Change Management process workflow now
  • We are better able to serve our customers because our documentation and communication have increased
  • We will be offering self-service options when we make the Cherwell self-service portal live to our customers later this month
CIT had used HEAT for 15 years, which was about 10 years more than we should have. Our HEAT implementation was extremely customized and though we used HEAT well and our processes were melded with HEAT, there were many areas for improvement. Tickets would get lost or a task would be lost or the ticket would go through many hands without proper documentation. It was just fairly clunky and not very scaleable.
I would say Cherwell is best suited to an organization that needs to create a process for taking in and bringing work tickets through a process that has struggled with implementing a process. Cherwell can be bent to an existing process, but it's going to take a lot of customization and work. Cherwell works best if you adapt to its out-of-the-box process, which may be difficult if you already are working within a set standard of procedures and process and Ticket lifecycle.

Cherwell Service Management Feature Ratings

Organize and prioritize service tickets
10
Expert directory
9
Service restoration
7
Self-service tools
4
Subscription-based notifications
6
ITSM collaboration and documentation
8
ITSM reports and dashboards
4
Configuration mangement
7
Asset management dashboard
3
Policy and contract enforcement
3
Change requests repository
8
Change calendar
8
Service-level management
8