Business

LSI Logic designs and manufacturers semiconductors for a variety of end users.

Business Challenge

As the company continues to grow, Mike Liveright one of two system managers in the specialized high performance chips area, needed to find a solution for their customer issues management tracking. His area supports 200 end users with their requests for assistance. After reviewing the situation and what was needed, he outlined an action response system. Something that would place the users request for help in a queuing area which could then be accessed by the next available system manager. This removed the need to have the customer camp out on our door step or phone for an answer. At first, Liveright considered creating this action response system himself. He recognized that updating the system would be a problem possibly more cumbersome and time absorbing than what currently existed. He went looking for a solution. After reading an advertisement for Tower Concepts configuration management product Razor, he believed they possessed the answer to his problem.

Tower Concepts Solution

Tower Concepts strategy in making the Razor product small and modular, user configurable, easy to use and learn was "right on" with what he needed Liveright bought a trial unit and after a week realized he couldn't live without it.

Although Razor has expandability beyond being a problem queuing system, Liveright believes that for his specific application it does what it's suppose to do extremely well and with almost no learning curve. Recently, he had to redesign the reporting output which will enable the system managers to forward the status reports directly to the customers thereby keeping them updated on recent developments. This benefits the system managers by increasing their productivity and reducing duplication efforts. Liveright estimates that he's been able to save 10% of his time a week by using Razor. He mentioned that if a company is able to save roughly $10K a year and increase productivity and customer satisfaction by purchasing a product that is $500 who wouldn't consider this solution for issue management. Liveright hasn't had a need to use Tower Concepts' customer support group for any support issues but does provided valuable feedback to the company on considerations for the next version of the product. He believes they really listen to their customers for feedback and input.

Visit LSI on the web.

Business

Salix Systems, a division of Western Printing Machine Company, is a software developer. Their main product is "DocStor", a distributed, client/server, document management system. They also produce software related to the printing industry including KnifeLocator and GILDA (Graphical In-line Design Assistant).

Business Challenge

Brian Spears, Manager of Software Engineering for Salix Systems needed a better way to track and provide detail information on the numerous changes that are made to the source code which involves over 100,000 lines of code. There were several products available that seemed to address issue and bug tracking management but they had a high price tag and were developed for over 1,000 users. This was much more than what they needed. One solution seemed to meet their specifications - the Razor configuration management product from Tower Concepts.

Tower Concepts Solution

They liked Razor because of its simplistic strategy - easy to configure, use and reasonable in price. A strategy which can be very powerful. It was also sold with a floating license which means they're only charged for how much they use the product. At this time, they're only utilizing the issue management or bug tracking portion of the product. While they purchased the complete Razor configuration management product and currently only use the bug tracking portion, they have found the tracking solution to be worth the complete price. Spears noted that Razor enables the users to be better organized thereby increasing the productivity of the growing software development staff, and that use of Razor has expanded to include customer support personel and technical writers.

Visit Salix on the web,
or write them for more info.

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