Three months, eight hours of consultancy: the help desk swap that didn’t drag on

Eight hours. That’s how much consultancy Core Financial Systems needed from its software vendor to replace the system that ran its customer support operation. I had to read that twice.

Anyone who has lived through a software migration knows the usual script: a kickoff full of optimism, a timeline that keeps slipping, and a go-live date that ends up being more of a suggestion. So when I came across this case, a Dublin-based financial software provider that moved its support desk to the cloud in about three months, I wanted to understand how it pulled it off.

The company behind the story

First, some context. Core Financial Systems has spent more than 25 years supporting organizations in the financial sector. It works with Infor SunSystems and related tools, and builds tailored solutions that extend those platforms through consulting, support and development services. Its clients rely on it when something in their financial systems needs attention, so the way it handles support requests matters.

A help desk that had fallen behind

Before the switch, those requests lived in BMC Track-It!, an on-premise ticketing system that, by the company’s own account, had fallen behind what both the team and its clients needed. There was no customer portal. There was no practical way to track service level agreements (SLAs), the response and resolution targets a support team commits to. And every month, one person spent almost a full working day gathering data and fixing spreadsheets in Excel just to put performance reports in front of customers.

The day-to-day wasn’t much better. Handling evidence was cumbersome, and digging through ticket history took time. Email was its own small headache: if a customer copied a consultant on a message, or a customer’s system fired off an automated reply, Track-It! would often open a duplicate ticket. Then someone had to close it by hand.

What finally forced the issue was a strategic customer asking for a portal with live visibility into support performance. The old system couldn’t deliver it, and the data it held was hard to trust anyway.

Keep the process, change the platform

Here’s where it gets interesting. Core Financial Systems chose InvGate Service Management on a peer’s recommendation and went in with two clear priorities: get support into the cloud quickly, and don’t make staff relearn how they work. Rather than redesign everything, the team replicated its existing support process in the new platform and refined its service catalog, the list of requests customers can raise, with custom fields.

The project kicked off in January and went live in early April. With those eight hours of vendor consultancy and a small internal team, the company set up a full service management environment, with dashboards, a service catalog and defined user roles. Being in the cloud also meant agents and customers could log in securely from anywhere, including from mobile devices.

Olga Woods, a support consultant at the company, sums up the choice in one line: “InvGate is easy to use and quick to implement, and that’s exactly what we needed.”

From a full day in Excel to instant reports

The change people notice most is in reporting. The monthly ritual of exporting data and rebuilding reports in Excel is gone, replaced by dashboards. Auditors and customers can now check SLA and performance information whenever they need it, and internal teams use the same numbers to keep an eye on workloads and response times.

Woods doesn’t mince words about the old setup: “I’d say it wasn’t even possible to get the correct data in our old system. We had to manipulate a lot of the data in Excel. It would typically take somebody almost a full day at the end of the month. Now it’s instant.”

The smaller wins that add up

Smaller things changed too. Agents paste screenshots and notes straight into tickets, and custom fields track development-related work, such as whether an issue is a bug, a training need or already resolved, without a separate spreadsheet on the side.

The company says customer satisfaction has gone up and response times have come down since the switch. But the detail that stuck with me is a human one. Thanks to clear assignments and alerts, consultants who had avoided using a support platform before now use it regularly. Anyone who has tried to get a team to adopt a new tool knows that’s no small thing.

What comes next

So what’s next? With the main setup done, the team is exploring how InvGate’s workflow builder and AI features can automate more of the repetitive work. The goal is to bring resolution times down further and scale support as the company’s client base grows.

For those unfamiliar with the vendor: InvGate makes InvGate Service Management and InvGate Asset Management, IT service management and IT asset management platforms used by organizations such as PwC, Motorola, Allianz, Collins Aerospace and KPMG. The two products integrate with each other, so a support request can be linked to the asset it involves.

My takeaway

What I take away from this case isn’t really about the software. It’s that a fast migration doesn’t have to mean reinventing everything at once. Core Financial Systems kept the processes its people already knew, moved them to a better home and fixed the parts that hurt most. Three months later, it was done.