Setting up engagement contracts

You can link an issue to a contract by specifying the Guaranteed Response Time and the Guaranteed Fault Repair Time. These guarantees are part of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), i.e. a contract or part of a contract that specifies a set of services to provide to your customer.

This contract contains clauses for deadlines to meet in order to avoid penalties. The deadline is contractually very important. Note that deadlines can be linked to contracts but also to a person or a company.

In addition, linking a contract to an issue enables you to automate the input and start a colored counter in the task record sheet:

  • Green: the deadline is met, there are more than X hours left to take action (2 hours by default; refer to the setup)
  • Orange: the deadline is met, but there are less than X hours left to take action (2 hours by default)
  • Red: the deadline is no longer met (blinks once 00:00 is reached)

Let us say the Guaranteed Response Time is set to 4 hours (issue taken into account within 4 hours of its creation) and the Guaranteed Fault Repair Time is set to 2 days (issue resolved within 2 days).

When a contract is agreed on, you set up the following items in Akuiteo:

  • Guaranteed Response Time and/or Guaranteed Fault Repair Time.
  • Reception schedule: time period during which the issue is received and assessed. E.g. the issue must be assessed and entered within 4 hours after its reception.
  • Action schedule: time period during which the issue is processed. E.g. the issue must be processed and resolved within 48 hours after its creation.

An issue is sent by email at 2 AM. Though the issue immediately drops in the company's inbox, it will only be read at 9 AM.

The contract states that an issue must be assessed within 4 hours after its reception between 9 AM and 6 PM (reception time slot).

The issue is assessed and entered at 5 PM and will be sent to the Production team the day after, from 9 AM to 12 PM, as soon as the issue will be received.

Note about 24 hours and 1 day

1 day is not considered as 24 hours in a row.

  • If the contract is in hours and if you want to add a working day of 24 hours, then you must add 24 hours from the hour being taken into account.
  • If the contract is in days and if you want to add a working day, then you must add a day that will necessarily end at the end of the day, i.e. at the end of the activity period (6 PM for example).

When a customer wants to subscribe to a maintenance contract, you must enter it in the Help Desk module.

Prerequisite: The GRT and GFRT deadlines must be set up from Tools > Setup > Help Desk setup > Issues and tasks > Service Level Agreements (SLA).

1 Click on Help Desk > Contracts > Customer contracts > .
2 In the New contract screen, fill in the general information about the sales contract. The contract must be linked to a project.
3 In the Maintenance and penalties tab, specify if the customer wants to apply penalties in case the issues are not processed and resolved within the given deadline.
4 Save.

Information regarding the Guaranteed Repair Time and the Guaranteed Fault Repair Time must be entered in the contract lines, in the Services or Deadlines and Plans tabs.

Updating contract lines

You can update and mark as "not billed" multiple contract lines at once.

1 Open a help desk contract that has several lines.
2 In the Lines tab, select the desired lines and right-click.
3 Select Update the selected lines.
4 In the dialog box that opens, check Not billed then validate.