In a recent installation with our battery software management vendor, Time2Talk, they uncovered a problem that brought about real cost savings for a hospital, up to $498,000 a year! The day to day issue that the hospital was experiencing was an excess of help desk tickets on their workstation on wheels (WOWs). Up to 1,200 help desk tickets were coming in every month covering 1,500 WOW’s and it was taxing the IT department. The tickets were constant and the IT department could not make headway. Once a solution was implemented the hospital saw true cost savings and the solution freed IT staff to work on more valuable projects.
Before a solution could be found, the root cause needed to be uncovered. Upon further investigation, the IT department discovered that the WOWs were not being plugged in. Instead they were pushed out of the way and another cart was used instead. This process created an influx of un-operable WOWs with dead batteries.
Upon finding this, Time2Talk knew their battery management software was the right solution for this client. It was exactly what the software was designed for;
- To support and promote good charging practices
- Preserve battery
- Reduce IT time
- Share valuable business intel to make buy-redeploy decisions
- Even prompts green initiatives
But this was a new solution and needed to be proven! It sounded too good to be true.
- What kind of impact would be felt within the IT department?
- Would it implement good charging practices?
- How can management monitor these charging practices?
- Is there a true ROI in reducing the help desk tickets?
- Can this be done effectively and efficiently?
The state of the art battery management software was installed on all 1500 WOWs and a series of benchmarks developed. Here are the results of these benchmarks:
Software application delivered a pop-up message when battery was running out of power
- Decreased Help Desk tickets to 1,000/month
- An improvement but there were still too many
Increased frequency of pop-up messages
- Help Desk tickets decreased to 800/month
- Another nice improvement, but after further observation it was discovered that many pop-ups were happening on computers/carts that weren’t being used
Added voice prompt asking to be plugged in
- Help Desk tickets dropped to 200/month!
- And more importantly the end users had WOWs available to them when needed and the IT staff had time to work on valuable projects
Does this equate to showing real ROI? To dive into those numbers, we first had to look at the cost of 1,000 Help Desk tickets:
- With an average help desk ticket cost at $41.50 = $41,500/mo. or $498,000/year.
This was a significant cost savings and one that is quantifiable. Not only did the hospital see a significant return but they also saw:
- IT staff had time to work on projects
- Greater cart availability to end users
- Reduction in HD tickets
- Fewer carts needed in fleet
- Greater attention to more severe Help Desk tickets
- A step towards minimizing alarm fatigue
Next week, we will cover the additional saving this hospital saw as a direct result of the battery management software. Although we have not publicly disclosed the hospital, please call and we will be happy to talk about these results with you and explore how we can help you save money and discover a real ROI!
