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Since a few months it is possible to define SLA Notification schemes and relate these to the ‘Response and Resolution Targets’ section for incidents with impact ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’, and ‘Top’. This is done to...
Category: Service Level Agreements
Based on the service hierarchy, the 4me service provides a sophisticated mechanism for generating accurate real-time SLA reporting. The input for the SLA reports is the affected SLA records (ASLAs), which are automatically generated when...
Since a few weeks, the information that is necessary to identify a request in a supplier’s service management system that is different from 4me, is no longer stored per request but per account. This ensures...
4me informs users about impending (and active) target breaches using color codes, both in the Target column of the views and in the record headers. But sometimes, especially in the case of resolution targets for...
Earlier this year, the customer representative(s) of an SLA were given more privileges in 4me. Since then, they are able to see the ‘All Requests’ section in 4me Self Service and also have access to...
The watermelon effect: This beautiful metaphor first popped up in the service management world during the early 2000s, and how relevant it still is! Anyone who has been involved in outsourcing services for a while...
When a provider must wait for some customer action before work on a request or task can continue, it should not be held accountable for SLA breaches. By setting the status of the record to...
4me® is a high availability system, which means that the percentage of time our service is available to the users is exceptionally high. Conversely, the amount of time the service is unavailable to our users...
Last week’s release introduced the ability for a provider to stop the SLA clocks under certain conditions, using automation rules. This temporarily removes the accountability of a provider, for example when a workflow has to...
Since the previous release the customer representative(s) can see all requests and dashboards related to an SLA in 4me Self Service. It is now also possible to update customer representatives in an SLA using automation...
Service level agreements (SLAs) are established between service providers and customers to agree on a minimum service level. Whenever a request is registered, the clock of the affected SLAs starts running, so 4me can calculate...
Many large organizations work with experienced contact persons who have a good overview of their business processes. These people are not necessarily specialists. Giving them the Key Contact role would give them the ability to...
It is now possible to select multiple customer representatives per service level agreement. This is in essence a preparatory change for an enhancement (to be released at a later date) that will allow selected end...
It is now possible to access SLAs using automation rules. This can be especially useful for managed service providers (MSPs) that have many customers, and therefore have many SLAs to maintain. Imagine, for example, the...
It is now possible to use automation rules to update the members of a skill pool, and conversely to link a skill pool to a person. This can be very practical for making services available...
To enable organizations to measure the performance of the support teams that are responsible for a service instance that is or was affected by a request, the 4me service generates affected service level agreements (ASLAs)...
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) provide coverage for the users of the service, defining the minimum level of support that a provider is to offer a customer in case of a service degradation or outage. To...
In the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console, several reports can be found that present data about SLA targets that were either met or violated. To give organizations better insight into the specifics and numbers...
Another new filter has been added to the ‘Service Level Agreements’ view of the Records console. The Coverage filter selects SLAs based on the defined group of people that are covered for a certain SLA....
A new filter has been added to the SLA reports that can be found in the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. This new filter is called ‘Request source’. It can be used to limit...
SLA reports show both the target and actual level of service provided for the KPIs ‘Availability’, ‘Reliability’, ‘Responses within target’ and ‘Resolutions within target’. For people who want to know exactly how the actuals are...
A new option has been added to the 4me Self Service menu. The new option is called 'My Services'. Selecting this menu option takes the user to a section that lists all the services...
Another advanced SLA tracking feature has been added to the unique SIAM capabilities that 4me offers. As with any of 4me’s advanced features, this one is also best explained using a simple use case. In...
A new report has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. The new report is called 'SLA Availability'. It offers a graphical representation of target and actual availability over time. The data...
It is now common for 4me customers to manage hundreds of SLAs in their 4me account. For managed service providers (MSPs) that use 4me the number of SLAs is typically in the thousands. Because of...
Yet another improvement has been made to the time entry export feature. This feature is primarily used by managed service providers (MSPs) to integrate their 4me environment with their billing system. A time entry export...
When a customer has linked its 4me account with the 4me account of an external provider, and the provider has registered an SLA for the customer, then the customer is able to see the service...
A small usability improvement has been made for service level managers. When they register a new SLA, they will notice that the Service offering field behaves differently. It used to be a simple dropdown field,...
The service and service instance views now have a new filter called ‘First line team’. This filter makes it possible to limit the services or service instances listed in a view to those that have...
The 'Customer Reports' section of the Analytics console offers service provider organizations a powerful real-time overview of how well they are performing for each of their customers. The bottom section of each monthly customer report...
The SLA reports that are available in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console can now be filtered by business unit. When a business unit is used as a filter, the report includes only the...
Organizations with operations at many geographically dispersed sites may find it useful to see whether there are considerable differences in support performance between sites. The following two reports have been added to the 'Reports' section...
The filter 'Service level agreement' has become available for the service instance and service offering views. This makes it possible to quickly look up the service offering or service instance of a specific SLA. The...
When a request is initially linked to a service instance, but is later linked to another service instance that is not hierarchically below the previous one, the affected SLA for the first service instance is...
Support organizations are now able to add another interesting report to their SLA tracking dashboards. The new report that has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console is called 'Outage Duration by...
Two new SLA reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. The first is the 'Current SLA Targets' report. It shows the number of affected SLAs of the support organization that...
The following four reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console to help organizations keep track of their SLA performance, as well as the SLA performance of the service providers they...
In 4me it is possible for someone to have SLA coverage for more than one instance of the same service. For example, a manager of a multinational organization may be covered for several payroll environments. ...
A few more date range filters have become available. These new filters have become available for the views and reports of the following record types: Requests Next target Problems Analysis target Releases, Changes, Tasks, Projects...
Some service owners may want to analyze their performance in great detail. One way to do this is by opening the report 'Percentage of SLA Resolution Targets Met and Violated by Service'. A service owner...
Yet another filter has become available for the SLA reports that can be found in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. This new filter makes it possible to filter an SLA report by a...
The target definitions of a service level agreement (SLA) are specified in a service offering. This makes it possible for providers to define multiple service offerings for each of their services. A provider may, for...
When providers register their services in 4me, they also register at least one service offering for each service. Each service offering defines the targets, terms and conditions for the SLAs that will later be registered...
4me is renowned for its SLA reporting. Before each release, automated scripts test over 100 scenarios to ensure that even edge cases cannot negatively affect the accuracy of the SLA reports. There is one edge...
In the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console there are a number of SLA reports that allow support organizations to look at the average time it takes to provide a response or resolution. These reports...
SLA reports can now be filtered by the current value in the Member field of the requests for which the affected SLAs were generated. The Member filter has also been added to the view in...
The reports that are based on the data of Affected SLA records now have two additional filters. These new filters allow the SLA reports to be filtered by the first line team or support team...
The new pricing structure that was unveiled during last week's 4me Connect 2020 event includes one plan that is completely free. This Freemium plan makes it possible for a support organization to set up a...
The release that went to production this past weekend included an improvement for Affected SLA export files. The following eight columns have been added to these export files: Customer ID Customer Service Level Agreement ID...
The filter 'Completion reason' has been added to the reports that make use of the SLA resolution target data of affected SLAs. This makes it possible to limit these reports to the data from affected...
Because most support organizations are not only tracking their SLA resolution targets, but also their SLA response targets, the following three reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console: Average Time...
Two more filters have become available for filtering the SLA reports that are available in the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. The first makes it possible to limit the affected SLA records that are...
The'Reports' section of the Analytics console provides quite a number of reports that are based on the Affected SLA records. These reports can be found easily by entering sla in the Search box above the...
Even though requests can only be related to a single service instance, an incident in one service instance may actually affect multiple service instances. That is why it may be more useful for organizations to...
An advanced SLA feature has become available for enterprises with multiple support domain accounts, for example for their IT, HR and Finance departments. This feature becomes available when one support domain registers an SLA for...
The service level agreement reports that are available in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console could already be filtered by the SLA's customer organization. That filter is simply called Customer. The customer of an...
Now that skill pools can be defined, it has also become possible to provide the members of a skill pool SLA coverage. To explain why this is useful, let's take an example where a company...
Many reports in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console are based on data from affected SLA records. From these reports people can drill down into views that list the affected SLA records that were used...
4me records are often related to multiple other records. The unique strength of 4me is that it allows support organizations to link their 4me accounts so that they can work together. When one organization’s 4me record contains...
The option 'Service Navigator' is now also available in the Actions menu for people who are working in the 'SLA Reports' section of 4me's Analytics console. When this option is selected from the Actions menu,...
When an outage occurred in the beginning of a month, the actual availability value that would be presented in the SLA reports that can be found in the 'SLA Reports' section of the Analytics console...
The views that contain affected SLA records and the SLA reports have a few more filters now. The filters that were added are: Customer Customer account Provider account The 'Service Provider' filter was already available....
To pass a request to the 4me account of another provider, a service instance of this provider needs to be applied to the request. This ensures that the request gets included in this provider's SLA...
Another useful report has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. This new report tracks the number and percentage of requests that are submitted using 4me Self Service over time. It is...
Many enterprise service management tools claim to be SIAM compliant, but most are not. This white paper explains which requirements must be met to be SIAM compliant and how this can be tested. Continue reading
Another SLA report has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. This report has a specific focus on requests that are linked to an affected SLA but for which a resolution target...
Three interesting reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These reports provide different graphical presentations of the average time it has taken to get the affected SLAs of requests to...
Organizations perfect the categorization of their services from time to time. When they do, they are often left with a few service categories that no longer contain any services. To help them maintain a clean...
Over time, some requests collect a lot of notes in their Notes section. For example, when the requirements of a request for a non-standard change are not immediately obvious, the request may go back and...
Several powerful reports have been added that allow organizations to see how often they manage to meet their SLA targets for each service or each service instance. The following reports show the number of times...
Sometimes an SLA is no longer considered affected by a request. That happens, for example, when the provider that is responsible for the SLA has rejected the request.Continue reading
A new view has been added to the Records console for requests. This new view is called 'Requests My Team Is Accountable For'. Continue reading
After a request has been related to a service instance, 4me knows that the first line team or the support team of the service instance is responsible for meeting the response and resolution targets specified...
The report 'SLA Resolutions Over Time' has been added. It shows the trend of the number of resolutions that were provided. This number is presented for each time interval as a bar. In addition to...
It is now possible to reactivate an expired SLA, first line support agreement or contract. This makes it possible to temporarily expire an agreement, or to activate a contract again after its status was accidentally...
Several filters have been added to the SLA reports that can be found in the 'Reports' section of the Settings console. The additional filters are: Continue reading
The Expiry Date column has been added to the views of SLAs, first line support agreements and contracts. This column is primarily intended to provide an easy way to look up the agreements and contracts...
Another 3 reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. The new reports are focused on SLA response targets. Continue reading
In the Service Offering form it is now possible to specify default targets for requests for change (RFCs) and requests for information (RFIs). Once defined, these targets are automatically applied when someone, who is covered...
The options that allow service level managers to define who is covered by a service level agreement (SLA) have been extended. Continue reading
The 'Underpinning SLAs' section has been added to the SLA reports that 4me generates. This new section can be really useful when investigating SLA violations. It shows the service level agreements that are in place...
One of the capabilities that makes the 4me service so unique is its support for SIAM (service integration and management). 4me makes it possible for organizations to work together on the support of services. From...
When notice needs to be provided before a certain date to terminate an SLA or contract, it would be nice if the responsible person could be warned in advance. It would also be nice to...
To expire an SLA, service level managers have always specified the end date in the Expiry date field. The 4me service subsequently ensures that the status of the SLA gets set to 'Expired' at midnight...
There are different ways to specify who is covered by an SLA. The coverage of most SLAs is defined by selecting the organizations which employees are to be covered. Enterprises with large organizational hierarchies asked...
Let's say a user submits a request. In this request the user explains that his laptop's battery is no longer charging. He also explains that he will not be in the office until Tuesday. The...
When you open the Affected SLAs section of a request, you will see that the affected SLAs of the providers that you work for are highlighted. The highlight color indicates how close the next SLA...
The reason why 4me is capable of measuring SLAs accurately up and down the service hierarchy and across organizational boundaries has a lot to do with the Service Instance record type. We recently added the...
