Getting to Press Faster with ProForma and Jira Service Desk

A Sheriff’s Office in Monmouth County New Jersey is using ProForma and Jira Service Desk to digitize processes. One example is how they manage print shop requests. Staff can request business cards, manuals, training materials, etc. from their internal printshop.

Paper Requests Forms

Before converting to Jira Service Desk, the process for requesting something from the print shop has long been paper-based, with employees filling out a form, getting their supervisors sign off, and then delivering the form and a hard copy of the item they wanted reproduced to the print shop. 

Such a system came with a lot of bottlenecks:

• The form could get lost in an in-box, waiting for the supervisor’s approval.
• The print shop frequently request electronic copies of the documents, which were not always easy to locate. In some cases, staff had to scan in training manuals in order to supply the PDF.
• There was no easy way for the print shop to manage demand, prioritize which jobs to produce first, or quickly check the status of a given request. 
• Making changes to an already submitted request, or requesting a reprint, was inefficient. The whole process had to start over again.

With ProForma and Jira Service Desk

Moving the process into Jira Service Desk has addressed these challenges. The team was able to easily create the form they need in ProForma, starting with a template from the ProForma form library. No coding was necessary and there was no need for extra custom fields or complex configurations.

Now, employees submit their print requests via the JSD portal. This has multiple advantages for both employees and the print shop team:

• The JSD request form asks for all of the required information, with validation to ensure completion and request within allowable limits.  The print shop rarely has to come back with more questions.
• A file upload field means that users can submit digital copies of the documents to be printed.  This builds a library of digital documents that the print shop can easily access when it’s time to reprint.
• ProForma allows users to edit their request forms via the portal, so if someone realizes they need 200 brochures not 2,000, the information will be in the appropriate field on the request form, not buried in an easy to miss comment.
• Approvals are built into the process and easy for approvers to access and respond to – a major time saver.
• As the request makes its way through the process, employees are able to follow the progress and check the status of their request at any time.
• Managing their work in queues and having access to analytics means the print shop can prioritize requests as appropriate, saving those big, but not urgent jobs for down times.
• Analytics also makes it easy to demonstrate print shop utilization to management (need to justify a new a copy machine…?) 

Do you have paper-based processes that are ready for a refresh? See how ProForma can make it easy to bring any business process into Jira Service Desk. 

Smoothing the Way for Change

The transition from paper to JSD and ProForma has been highly successful. What used to take two weeks now takes as little as one day. And every step in the process is trackable.

This is just one of several processes that Systems Analyst, Kevin Decker is bringing into Jira Service Desk. He’s learned a few tricks to reduce friction and increase uptake of new systems. They linked the JSD portal to the intranet site where employees are already used to going. To reduce login difficulties, agents and approvers use their company login as their Jira login.

Simplifying rollout is important because in going from paper files stacked on a desk to easily accessible digital records, from difficult to track/audit to end-to-end traceability at the touch of a button, and from maybe or maybe not up to date information to real-time data, people have thought of a lot more processes – both internal and external – that they want to bring into Jira.