FrontRange's HEAT Product Suite is designed to make it easy to customize and automate common tasks and business rules.

by Jeff Goldman [March 8, 2006]

FrontRange Solutions was founded back in 1989 by Ron Muns, who now heads the Help Desk Institute. FrontRange is headquartered in Dublin, California, with additional offices in Colorado Springs, Colo.

FrontRange Solutions (800) 776-7889 sales@frontrange.com

The HEAT Product Suite is the company's core incident management solution. FrontRange Product Manager Jason Holmberg says the suite is built around a central call tracking system, which can be integrated with a telephone system to provide each technician with key information automatically on every incoming call.

Once a call has been answered, Holmberg says, the system provides the tech with guidance on the best series of questions to ask in response to any common problem. And as a ticketing system, the history of each ticket within HEAT is tracked and recorded regardless of who updates or accesses the information.

The system can also be used to track multiple customer types, allowing it to be used in specific ways for both internal and external service issues. "Hardware might have a specific level of call types that you can assign to it, and for an external customer, you might have another set of call types," Holmberg says. "Depending on the customer type, different information can show up on the screen."

Automation and customization
HEAT's key strength, Holmberg says, lies in its ease of use, both in daily operation and in automating common tasks. If, for example, an ISP has an outage and customers are calling in repeatedly with the same problem, a technician can copy identical call reports from customer to customer with a single click. "It saves that technician time, not having to write a bunch of information into each call record," he says.

Customization, Holmberg says, is equally simple to implement. "It's very easy to customize the look and feel of each system, to add fields, to put in some form rules so if Field A is equal to X, make sure that only a specific number of values are available in Field B," he says. And all fields can be enabled with auto-fill capabilities to make it easier for technicians to enter information.

According to Holmberg, all of these changes can be implemented without any programming ability. "We provide a graphical user interface and an administration tool that allows you to do all of this customization without having to know C++ or any other type of coding language," he says. "That's extremely important for somebody that needs to get a solution up and running quickly."

As a result, Holmberg says, implementation of a new HEAT system usually takes two weeks at the most—and it's easy to maintain once it's installed. "We have a couple of customer case studies where a company that was using another solution had three administrators, and [with HEAT], they were able to knock that down to one person who just administered the system about 50 percent of the time," he says.

A modular architecture
HEAT Service and Support is the key product within the HEAT Product Suite—it includes the call tracking/trouble ticketing and administration tool, as well as an e-mail support system, a business rule engine, and an alert monitor utility. A reporting feature with 300 pre-defined reports is also included.

Beyond the capabilities of HEAT Service and Support, optional modules can be added to provide more functionality—including HEAT Asset Tracker, the remote access tool iHEAT, HEAT Self Service, and the answer tree tool HEAT Plus Knowledge.

HEAT Self Service, Holmberg says, is an easily customizable ASP Web application that allows a subscriber to log into page on the ISP's Web site and create a trouble ticket without having to speak to a technician. "It basically provides 24/7 support access without necessarily having somebody on the phones," he says.

Similarly, the HEAT Plus Knowledge module provides an a searchable knowledgebase on the ISP's website. Clicking on a 'Request Help' button on the knowledgebase Web page automatically creates a ticket in the HEAT system, so that when a technician calls the customer in response, he or she already knows what information that customer has viewed online.

Reporting and pricing
According to Holmberg, the HEAT Product Suite ships with a license of Crystal Designer, so if an ISP requires any customized reports in addition to the 300 that are included, it's easy to create them. "We get you maybe 80 percent of the way there with the reports, and there's no reason why you can't use Designer to modify the reports to get the information that you're looking for," he says.

Pricing is structured differently for each module within the system. HEAT Service and Support is priced per seat on a concurrent user basis, so you can have any number of users defined in the system as long as no more than the assigned number of technicians is accessing it at any given time. HEAT Self Service is priced on a per-server basis, and HEAT Plus Knowledge is priced per user.

While the HEAT Product Suite runs only on Windows, Holmberg says, iHEAT can be used to access the system from any browser. "With our iHEAT product, we offer a native Macintosh and native Linux client—and we work with Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Sybase and Access, and we really don't care what the database's operating system is," he says. "If you have Oracle running on Linux, we can still connect to you."

The key differentiator for HEAT, Holmberg says, is how simple it is to customize and automate routine tasks and business rules—which makes it easier and cheaper to install and run the solution. "Out of the box, we pride ourselves on getting the customer 80 percent of the way there with what they need to successfully operate the service desk—and the other 20 percent is just tweaking it to your individual needs," he says.

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Online resources:
	Trouble Ticketing Systems Directory
	Quick Reference Chart