Getting started with service request management

The following figure shows how you can implement Service Request Management in BMC Remedyforce:

To get started with SRM implementation, configure the following:

Accounts

Add the service providers of services as accounts in BMC Remedyforce. For example, the service provider of a New Hire Request is the IT Department of the organization.

To understand the field descriptions and for more information about adding accounts, see Creating accounts. Also, see Salesforce Help.

Categories

You create different request definitions for different categories to show only related request definitions when a client is submitting a service request in Self Service. For example, if you want create request definitions for HR and Finance departments in your organizations, you can have HR and Finance as categories. 

You can also create parent-child relationship between categories by defining category types. Some categories are provided to you out-of-the-box, such as Account Administration, Network, and so on.

For information about adding categories, see Creating categories.

Status

Status of a record helps you to track the record through its life cycle. The following points help you in understanding the difference in the terminologies used to create a status:

• State: Determines if a record is opened or closed. Status will either has state opened or closed.
• Status: Determines where the record is in the life cycle, such as accepted, assigned.
• Stage: Grouping of various status values, such as Active, Approved, Broken Down, Development, and so on are grouped under In Progress stage. A stage tracks a record from Opening to Closure. The following stages are provided:
  • Opened
  • Acknowledged
  • In Process
  • Closed

You must assign the status that you add to one of the stages.

For more information about adding status, see Creating status records.

Impact-urgency-priority

Impact and urgency values of a record determine the priority assigned to the record. By default, some urgency, impact, and priority values are provided. The following figure shows how priority is calculated depending on the impact and urgency values:

Determine if you need additional impact, urgency, or priority values. If yes, also determine how the urgency and impact values will determine the priority. For more information, see Creating impacts, Creating urgencies, and Creating priorities.

Workflows

Workflows help you in automating frequently occurring actions in your service desk. For example, you can create a workflow to send an email message to clients whenever the status of the service request raised by them is updated. BMC Remedyforce provides you some workflows out of the box. All these workflows are inactive by default. You must activate the workflows that you need.

The following workflows are provided out of the box for service requests:

• Notify the client when a service request is closed

• Notify the client when a service request is created

• Notify the client when a service reqeust is reopened

• Notify the client when a service request status is changed

For more information about activating a workflow, see Configuring workflows.

Prepare a list of workflows that you will need in your service desk. Create the workflows that are not provided out of the box. For more information, see Salesforce Help.

Administrator settings

The Remedyforce Administration tab is one-stop location for all the configurations that are available in BMC Remedyforce. It also contains links to the Salesforce Setup area. All the settings are categorized in various tiles. The following settings are related to service requests in Remedyforce Console and Self Service:

Business hours

For the services that you want to offer, add the business hours in which these services are supported by your organization. For more information, see Configuring the default business hours and holidays of your organization. 

Services and service offerings

Prepare a list of services that you want to offer to your clients. For example, for IT department, you can have services like Business Applications and Desktop Support services. You can add services in the Remedyforce CMDB tab as instances of Business Service. For more information, see Creating services.

You might have services available in another application. BMC Remedyforce enables you to import services from any of the following applications:

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager
• BMC Atrium CMDB
• BMC Atrium Discovery
• BMC BladeLogic Client Automation
• Dell KACE
• BMC Client Management

Also, create service offerings for each service. A service offering is a type of service that an organization makes available to its users. For example, Silver (service delivered in 5 days), Gold (service delivered in 3 days), and Platinum (service delivered in 1 day). You can add service offerings also in the Remedyforce CMDB tab as an instances of Business Service. For more information, see Creating services

Self Service

You can create the Self Service web site for your clients that they can use to:

• submit incidents (or tickets) and service requests
• search for solution to an issue
• read knowledge articles

When you install BMC Remedyforce, you must configure the Self Service site in Salesforce. For more information, see Configuring the Self Service site for clients.

After creating the Self Service site, you can customize the behavior of the site for your users. All the settings are provided in the Configure Self Service tile in the Remedyforce Administration tab. For more information about these settings, see Configuring the Self Service site for clients.

For commonly occurring issues, you can create templates for Incidents and enable these templates to be displayed in Self Service. For more information, see Creating templates.

Use Salesforce Translation Workbench to localize Self Service. For more information, see Localizing Self Service.

Templates

Using templates, you can pre-populate fields on a form, which reduces the need to enter commonly used data, or create records to provide an automated workflow process. To create a request definition, the following templates are required:

• Incident template to create record of an incident object when a service request is created.
• Request Detail template where you can specify quantity.
• Task and change request templates to fulfill a service request.
  For example, to fulfill a service request, staff members must send a procurement request and install an operating system on a laptop. For such a service request, create two change request or task templates for these actions and link them to the request definition that is used to create the service request.

Reports

Staff members and system administrators can use the Reports tab to view predefined reports. You can also create reports based on your requirements. However, only the system administrators can create additional report types.

For system administrators, data is also available in the form of charts and tables in the Dashboards tab. To enable staff members with Salesforce or Salesforce Platform license access the Dashboards tab, assign the Manage Dashboard profile-level permission.

Testing your environment

BMC Remedyforce

• Ensure that you are able to create a request definition in the Remedyforce Administration tab.
• Ensure that you are able to create a service request in the Remedyforce Console tab.
• If you have activated workflows, ensure that the workflows are triggered at the configured condition.

Self Service

• Ensure that you are able to log on to Self Service by using the logon credentials of a client.
• Ensure that you can submit a service request.