CI Renewals

[paul989]

Hi,
I am having some difficulty trying to fit a business process into OTRS:ITSM. I think I am missing something!

The Process:
===========
We have a lot of customers with equipment (phone systems). Each customer has a maintenance contract. A month before the maintenance contract expires we send a proposal for a renewal, and then escalate reminders till we either get paid or cancel the contract.
At any time if a customer raises a support issue my agents should be able to see the current support status and then send the ticket to engineers or finance department depending on the support status.

Aim:
====
I want to:
1) generate a list of actions to renew contracts
2) track the conversation with the customer (phone, email)
3) record the new contract and support level details
4) at any point if customer raises a support issue my team need to see at a glance if customer has current support contract, and what level.

Thoughts so far:
=============
1) a phone system is a configuration item, customer is the owner, Maintenance Expires is a date on the CI
2) I should be able to automatically generate RFC tickets for all CI's of type "phonesystem" with MantenanceExpires less than 1 month in the future
2a) I could then use either the Queue, or a Change Workflow to track the renewal through a workflow : proposal sent, reminder1 sent, reminder 2 sent, payment received, contract renewed, contract cancelled)
3) I should be able to add a couple of lines to the customer detail pane on a phone ticket creation window to show a link to the phonesystem owned by that customer and also show the maintenance status for the customer.

The following query needs some more review but seems to be on the right track for pulling the list of systems which need contract renewal:
#select MaintenanceExpirationDate, CItype, CIversion_id, id from (select xml_type, xml_key, str_to_date(xml_content_value, "%Y-%m-%d") as MaintenanceExpirationDate, SUBSTRING_INDEX(xml_type,'::',-1) as CItype, xml_key as CIversion_id, id from xml_storage, configitem where xml_content_key like "%MaintenanceExpirationDate%Content%" and xml_storage.xml_key=configitem.last_version_id) as maintenanceDate where MaintenanceExpirationDate < Now() + INTERVAL 12 month order by MaintenanceExpirationDate Asc ;

Then there are links on using the api to create new tickets:
# see vi /opt/otrs/scripts/rpc-example.pl
# for example of perl connection to otrs over soap API.
#also php
#http://faq.otrs.org/otrs/public.pl?Acti ... ItemID=369

QUESTIONS:
Am I going in the right direction, or is there a simpler approach?
Is there anyway to add config item links and information to the customer panel?

Any comments or advice would be appreciated as I am concerned that there is something I have missed, and there is an easier way to build out this process.

[keihell]

Hi Man,
can I make a stupid question?....

What do you mean with CI???

[Wolfgangf]

Well,

you could install the Import/Export Module, define an Export for your phonesystem CIs containing the needed fields like maintenance date.
Import/Export can be run in a cron job
Then grab up this file with some small script parses the export file, looks for the maintenance date and if expired: sends a mail to OTRS e.g. open a ticket

Hope that helps