CA Service Management

Many of our service jobs recorded in Service Desk are against time and materials contracts. I am wondering if there is a way for Service Desk to integrate support for a customer pre-paid bank of service hours. In such a scenario, as tickets are worked on the time spent on these would draw down against this pre-paid bank of hours. Reports could be then generated on remaining hours in the contract to keep the customer apprised of their utilisation.

Are there any persons in the community using Service Desk to record time spent on jobs which then has integrated reporting against time consumed from a bank of hours? If so what solutions have you guys come up with?

Hi Michael - this is a very interesting use case.  I have not come across any customers using the product for something like that.  I would think that you could create a custom field on the service contract object (assuming you are using service contracts to manage these "jobs" now in SDM) to hold that time-bank value.  Then you would need to create custom code to calculate the number of hours spent, and subtract that from the time-bank value, updating the time-bank value with the remaining time after the calculation is done.  Now something like this would be way outside the scope of support, BUT thats not to say it cant be done.  There may be some folks out there that have done something like this and may be willing to share their info with you.

Jon I.

We have created separate Time Management solution for our customers so they can do their timesheeting by creating time entries related to incidents, requests, changes and projects. I would proceed in the same way in your case. You will also need to create new contract object to hold that time-bank value. Each time employee creates time entry he shall be forced to choose particular contract. Then by the means of the spell code you will be able to do all needed calculations.

Thanks for your reponse Gutis; when you say separate Time Management solution, would this be an architecture outside of CA Service Desk? If so, how are you exchanging data between the two platforms for the reporting aspect? Your comments about new contract object suggests that some data on the contract is being held within CA Service Desk. Can you help me understand your proposed solution a bit more?

We implemented everything in CA SDM

Hi Michael,

In a ticket like incident detail page has field Total Activity Time next to Summary field on out of box (detail_in.htmpl) page. This field hold the value of total Time Spent for the activities in the ticket under the Logs tab sub-tab Activities. Surely, Service Desk does not have field for the bank hours. It is not in Service Desk table schema. This kind of integration is not out of box.

I think any integration script(most likely some WS script to link the two apps) would use this Total Activity Time of the ticket. For cr/in/pr tickets, this attribute is "time_spent_sum".