Cherwell Service Management Reviews

We use the solution for IT service management, it's the key process for recording incidents or problems, and change management. We are customers of Cherwell and I'm an enterprise architect. 

Previously, the processes we now use Service Management for, were done manually. Implementing CSM has made us very efficient and we're now able to plan changes and the steps required for implementation. Everything is there and supported by the fact issues data that is being captured.

All our activities, our IT services, the catalog we have, are all in one place which makes it easy for us to report to management. Service Management also has self-service for our end users so that they can log calls and track. The product has a knowledge-based feature where we can log problems and incidents. We've extended our use of the solution to include our HR and legal departments, basically to anyone offering services within the organization who may have queries or service requests. The dashboard is great and the product is IT compliant. 

We need to be on VPN in order to set up and access the solution, and that has created some challenges. Even though it uses our Windows login, we still have to be on VPN. The product should be able to log tickets directly from system to system. We haven't got there yet and I'm not sure it's possible but it would determine the product's capability to integrate with other systems.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

It is a stable system. We've just had a couple of small incidents in four years so that's pretty good. 

The solution is scalable.

The customer service is responsive, we are happy with them.

Positive

Previously, we used a form that was completed using SharePoint. There was no correlation to our framework and we were unable to generate any dashboard insight.

The initial setup of the whole project took two to three months. We had a service provider carry out the implementation. We are not a big organization; we have around 170 users who are IT managers, administrators, technicians and business end users. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

My primary use of this is in a hospital environment to manage both clinical and non-clinical incidents. We also have a few integrations with third parties, for example, to track the levels in ink cartridges and alert when stock needs to be replaced.

The most valuable features are problem management and change management.

Areas for improvement would be the service catalog and customer catalog, which is not very user-friendly. The shopping cart experience is also terrible - you submit and go straight to the cart, you can't continue shopping or see your overall cost. In the future, I would like to see the addition of chatbots to the self-service portal.

I've been using this solution for about eight months.

I haven't experienced any problems with this solution from a performance point of view.

I use a support company called Service Quality, which is helpful, but whose quality of support varies depending on the expertise of the person you're dealing with.

Setup isn't straightforward because you can't always build relationships between forms, making it more difficult than just going from A to B and can be quite frustrating. This process should be wizard-driven rather than relying on the user to understand how to use code.

Cherwell isn't a bad tool out of the box, but it requires customization to enhance some features like change management. Some of the smaller customizations that longer than might be expected. This solution is fine for small to medium organizations, but I think it would be a struggle to implement in a bigger organization that wants lots of customization. I'd give Cherwell a rating of seven out of ten.

Our company does BMC, Cherwell, and ServiceNow implementation. We used Cherwell primarily for ITSM, and we did some discovery for CMDB and some orchestration. We used it with Azure.

Its integration features, orchestration features, and discovery tools are the most valuable. It is also pretty stable, and it can be as scalable as you want.

Application service mapping, GRC, SecOps, and things like that need improvement.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is a pretty stable platform. It is on-premise, so it is pretty stable because you're controlling your environment. Avante just bought them, so I don't know what Avante is going to do with it in terms of whether they are going to make it totally cloud-based.

It can be as scalable as you want because it is on-premise. You can buy as many servers as you want for it.

It is not as good as the ServiceNow ticketing tool, but it is good. The support from the actual manufacturer is poor. They don't really have any in-company tech support. You have to work with a Cherwell partner or something like that.

We also do ServiceNow implementations. ServiceNow is kind of the gold standard.

It is pretty complex on some premises.

For an ITIL user, the cost is probably about 50 bucks a month.

I would advise others to just be ready to have an on-premise solution. As far as configuration and everything goes, you will probably need a team of developers or implementers. It is highly configurable, so you would probably need some support in that area.

I would rate Cherwell Service Management a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for incident management, problem management, and change management. 

The dashboard and the reporting functionality are the solution's most valuable features.

The solution could be more user-friendly. The workflows sometimes get complicated.

The stability, specifically in the on-premises deployment model, could be improved.

I've been using the solution for less than a year.

The solution is stable. When it was on-premises, we did have issues with it. However, now that we are on the cloud, it is much more stable.

We've never attempted to scale the solution, so I can't speak to how easy it would be to expand it.

Currently, we have 130 people using the solution. 

We've contact technical support in the past. They're okay. We're largely satisfied with the level of support we've received.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup isn't complex. It took about two months to configure the solution. Deployment itself only takes about an hour.

We were able to implement the solution with the assistance of a consultant.

There aren't any costs that I know of that are above and beyond the standard licensing fee.

We use the solution every day and quite extensively.

For those considering implementing the solution, I'd say as long as you have your processes in order, it will be an easy solution to adopt. Without them ready and lined up, it will be a difficult implementation process.

I'd rate the solution overall seven out of ten. I'd rate it higher if it was more user-friendly in design.

• Change and release management
• Task management and resource management for middle size teams
• Reports are flexible to configure.

Clear processes with transparent responsibilities led to more efficiencies within the teams. Reporting and exporting them was easy.

The dashboard is very useful to get a quick overview of current tasks, tasks which are overdue, and mail notifications with progress information. This has been helpful.

• Agile delivery should be supported. 


• Plug-ins to JIRA would be welcome. 


• More fields for estimations and work done for summing up functionalities from subtask to main tasks would be helpful

The best feature is the ability to create functional dashboards, where the IT manager can interact with its data trough the dashboard using the drill down feature. Another relevant aspect, is the integrations that are very simple to do due to the open architecture of the system.

We provide a service to a large truck manufacturer, and they wanted to implement a customer service team that had an automated escalation process. Since they had a lot of different products, and each product had its own business rules to escalate, that was possible because of the Business Process feature that Cherwell has. It allows you to define, based on several criteria, such as incident classification, specific item in the service catalog, and the end-user, which way the escalation process goes.

They need to improve their mobile interface, as well as features regarding the extension of the mobile access to the end user. They also need to improve some aspects of their User interface to have an more modern look.

We have been using Cherwell for about two years now.

No, that’s actually a very key point: it never stops.

Not yet. The only aspect is that the infrastructure must be well designed, especially the database.

8/10.

8/10.

We used another ITSM solution that was ITIL framed, and did not have the ability to adapt to business process rules. So we switched, as Cherwell has the capability to create, and operate, any process besides the basic ITSM-ITIL framework.

The technical part of the implementation is very straightforward, the process definition is where it take more time, but this part is the same for all systems.

We did it in-house.

I think that’s always something harder to measure, but I would say that we were able to gain some clients due to the change to Cherwell.

They have a concurrent-user license model which is very interesting for larger organizations. I think that their price is quite fair for what they offer.

• CA Nimsoft Service Desk
• CA Service Desk Manager

It is important to design your processes, and define the business rules that 80% of the work will rely on.