Overview
All organisation knows an estimate of how much each incident, at least, costs to be resolved. Some have very basic information, some other have it broken down per category, priority, channel, etc…
However, most of them do not use the “Fixed Costs” plugin to do the Math directly in ServiceNow in order to know what’s the full cost of the support they provide. In this article we will see how easy this can be set up.
The plugin
Before taking about the content of the plugin itself, we need to install it. Locate the “Fixed Costs” (com.snc.fixed_costs) plugin and install it if it’s not installed yet on your instance.
Once this is done, there will be a new application menu called “Fixed Costs” with a single module inside called “Define Fixed Costs”:
By clicking on that module, we’d access the OOB definitions. In here you can see a list of examples that let you see you can create as many definitions based on the specific criteria you need. For instance, based on priority, category, channel, etc … but you could also do it based on any other field present in your Task.
Bear in mind you could calculate the cost not only for Incidents and Requests, but for CSM Cases, HR Cases, Security Incidents, and any other task in general.
If we open the OOB “Cost per Incident”, we will see a complete example of how they should be set up:
Bear in mind no definition comes enabled, so that you can configure the specific details for your organisation. Consider removing the OOB records once you have had a look not to, potentially, enable them by mistake.
As it’s common in these types of records, we are provided a “Table” field and a “Condition” to define which types of records will trigger our cost definition. This is critical as not all types of records will cost the same. For instance, a self-service incident will cost less than a phone-based one, same an incident resolved by the 1st line instead of the 3rd.
Continuing with the form, there’s a “Category” field which let’s us choose between “Total Fully Loaded Cost” which means regardless of the time it takes to solve it, its cost will be calculated the same way. Obviously, in real life that’s not true, but this category is useful when your organisation has calculated the cost per incident based on the average cost. If your organisation defines the cost per incident per hour, which is much more accurate, you should choose the other option, “Per Hour Cost”.
Finally, the “Source of the Cost” which is “HDI”, “ServiceNow” or “Manual”. This allows you to specify who has provided such information.
- Manual: Your organisation has calculated the specific cost taking into account your organisation’s infrastructure, licenses, salaries and any other expenses that may be required for resolving incidents.
- ServiceNow: Your organisation relies on information provided by ServiceNow as an estimate for how much an organisation should be, bearing in mind its size, industry, location, etc….
- HDI: Unfortunately, I didn’t find any official explanation or documentation that covers this, but apparently this term stands for “Help Desk Institute”, and it’s the one being used by ServiceNow on most of their OOB records.
This is just an informational value so that whoever sees the record knows where the “Cost Value” came from. Avoid relying on data that wasn’t calculated for your organisation as the accuracy of the results may dramatically fall.
Last, but not least, the plugin contains a couple of metric definitions, one for Incidents and another one for Requests, but you could create your own for any other kind of task you may need to apply this plugin to.
The metric definition simply calls a Script Include that performs the calculations underneath and creates the pertinent metric record.
Demo time
For this demonstration we understand the Fixed Cost Definition for Incidents has been enabled by clicking on “Active. When an incident is closed from that point onwards, it will generate a metric record tracking the cost in the value field.
In the example above I am simply creating a new incident and closing it right after submitting it for creation.
The metric record created looks like this:
As you can see, the Duration field comes empty, as the purpose of this metric is simply to give the cost involved in solving this incident, and not a combination of cost and duration.
If you want to also keep track of the duration you can use the OOB metric definition called “Incident State Duration” in combination with this.
Calculating the Cost Value
Although this is not a guide on how to do it, here are some examples of reasons why your organisation should calculate their own cost, and which elements will affect its calculation in case you are also tasked with it:
- People
- Operational costs aren’t the same in all countries, especially when it comes to paying salaries, legal rights, holidays, training, hiring, firing, …
- Additionally, remember that you also need to cater for third party companies your organisation outsources to, not just your organisation’s staffing costs
- Technology
- To give some examples, not all organisations have the same infrastructure, use the same software or pays the same licenses. Bear in mind when we mention “infrastructure” we not only need to remember the CapEx for the cost these elements had when bought or to be replaced, but also the OpEx. Electricity, phone bills, insurances, extra warranties, security, safety, maintenance, upgrade or decommission costs, just to mention some, need to be added to the calculation.
- Processes
- This is the forgotten one by most organisation. The higher the resolution steps, the more complex they are, the lower the automation, the higher the bureaucracy or legislation the higher the cost. Legislation cannot be reduced, but the rest can definitely be improved. Streamlining your processes removing all bottlenecks and manual actions is a big game changer when it comes to lowering the cost per ticket.
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