1. Improving service delivery, performance, and availability with minimal resources.

Leverage the ITIL best practices framework for Service Management

• ITIL Service Management principles are widely recognized as industry-proven guidelines for rapidly improving the efficiency of IT service delivery. Based on this recommended approach, Alloy Navigator 5 helps your organization implement a Service Desk system that is aligned with the current procedures, processes, and priorities of your business.
  
  Implementing Alloy Navigator 5 does not require learning about ITIL. In addition, industry best practices indicate that new IT processes should be introduced gradually, and Alloy Navigator 5 is designed with this approach in mind. Its different modules are tightly integrated, but have few interdependencies, so you can implement them in the order that best suits you.

Introduce multi-tiered service support processes

• Implement comprehensive, multi-tiered Incident Management and Problem Management processes, according to how your organization has defined them. For example, create dedicated Incident tickets for several related service interruptions, then use a Problem ticket to investigate and resolve the root causes of these interrelated Incidents.

Automate simple-to-complex support processes to enhance service quality and improve service satisfaction

• Alloy Navigator 5 features a powerful Business Logic engine to create business rules that automate responses to actions and events, such as email messages about new or modified service tickets, ticket auto-routing and assigning, ticket escalations, and more.
• Enhance the efficiency of the ticketing process with workflow automation, and help coordinate diverse tasks in large and widely distributed environments, minimize human error, enforce procedural standards, and save two critical resources: time and money.

Align service support activities with customer service expectations

• Ensure and exceed customer service expectations by documenting expected relationships between service providers and service recipients with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Define response time frames and priorities based on these support guidelines. Automatically generate priority and due dates for Incident tickets. Minimize service downtime and maximize availability and compliance. Produce metrics that monitor service delivery performance.

Empower technicians and end-users with 24/7 web-based access to service tickets.

• Deliver an expansive Web Portal interface to technicians and end-users. Provide them with robust ticket searching functionality and advanced filtering of tickets views. Let technicians create their own customized ticket views for rapid access to targeted information to perform their jobs more effectively. Give technicians unlimited remote access to the entire service support database.

2. Maximizing the value of your IT investments on a limited budget.

Make wise IT investment decisions based solely on their value to the business

• Manage the full lifecycle of any asset from its initial acquisition to its retirement. Use standard depreciation methods to track the current property value of your computer, hardware, and software assets. Archive retired assets as read-only records in the database. Use Finance Management data to prepare accurate business-cost justifications for infrastructure change.
• Alloy Navigator 5 extends the scope of hardware and software data available for reporting. Now you can easily create custom reports on the harware and software component level to facilitate planning hardware and software upgrades and migrations. Network Inventory includes the all-new ability to audit Mac OS X machines (in addition to existing audit agents for Linux and Windows platforms).
• Closely monitor the volume of service requests that are directly or indirectly related to specific configuration items in your infrastructure (e.g., equipment, software, etc.) by linking these items to their complete history of service support tickets. Report on all problem trends and minimize future problems with these configuration items (CIs.)

Control the process of making enterprise-wide changes to the IT infrastructure

• Implement a unified Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to serve as the core foundation for all Service Management processes. Tightly control all the relations and dependencies among all the CIs in the CMDB. Get all the details you need to identify and closely monitor an unlimited number of CIs throughout their complete lifecycle. Plan, control, maintain, and verify all the CIs that are essential to an IT service.
• Introduce proactive Change Management best practices to minimize the risk and potentially negative impact of changing interrelated components in your IT infrastructure. Use dedicated Change Request tickets to effectively implement changes without disrupting the continuity of mission-critical business operations.

3. Lowering TCO and achieving ROI in IT assets and employees.

Align IT with actual business priorities and processes

• Employ a groundbreaking technology tool to achieve a crucial balance between accomplishing business goals, and maximizing the value and minimizing the TCO of your IT assets. Optimize business performance by aligning IT with vital business processes.
• Achieve levels of IT service satisfaction that will promote significant gains in employee productivity. Realize a measurable growth in business revenue. Enhance the bottom-line profitability of the business.

Extend numerous productivity enhancements to Alloy Navigator administrators and technicians.

• Easily tailor the highly customizable database to exacting business requirements. Create an unlimited number of user-defined fields (UDFs), including currency, date, and lookups. For a custom fit with your organization, modify an extensive set of default dropdown lists and field captions. Use the Advanced Find mechanism to quickly locate any object in the database. Handle multiple tasks concurrently with the convenient tabbed interface.

Generate thousands of comprehensive asset management and service performance reports

• Capitalize on Alloy Navigator's seamless integration with the industry-leading Crystal Reports engine. Access a comprehensive set of advanced, pre-defined report templates, with the flexibility to run thousands of detailed management reports based on countless database parameters. Drill-down reporting and charting lets you quickly navigate displayed reports to the desired level of detail. Use your Crystal Report designer to change default reports and create new ones. Export and import any Alloy Navigator reports to and from other Alloy Navigator databases.

Share enterprise-wide intellectual capital

• Alloy Navigator's advanced Knowledge Base extends the value of the enterprise with an intuitive venue for storing and sharing its employees' intellectual capital. Edit Knowledge Base articles in HTML mode with no external tools. Manage the complete lifecycle of all articles from drafting to revising, approving, and publishing either internally or externally.

Deliver advanced database technology

• Alloy Navigator 5 supports MS SQL Server 2005 to deliver world-class system performance, availability, and security.
• Improved performance of the database backend boosts productivity of remote users accessing the database repository over such slower networks as WAN and VPN.