Ask a head of IT where the team's time goes, and you'll hear about the cloud migration and the next security audit. Your ticket history says something else. It's full of the VPN that won't reconnect after standby. The print queue that's stuck on the second floor. The login a new hire is missing on day one, and the ERP access request that's missing the cost center again.
Each of these takes a few minutes to fix. Together, they decide whether your team works on its projects or on the queue. We've analyzed over 40 million tickets from customer projects, and the pattern repeats from one company to the next: the most expensive work in IT is the most boring.
Ten topics, almost half the tickets
At a European manufacturer, we analyzed some 35,000 tickets. 48% of them involved just ten topics. Around 1,200 times a year, the request was about accounts and permissions, roughly five every working day. Getting ERP access took two to three days. Only 21% of requests arrived complete, and the rest went into a round of follow-up questions first.
A single case costs very little. The money is in the repetition: every case comes back, and every time it pulls someone away from their work. The minutes show up in the ticket. The broken-up afternoon shows up nowhere.
And you pay twice. Your team loses time it had planned for projects. And the employee with the VPN problem sits in front of a laptop she can't work on until someone has time for her.
Where the manual work stays
IT has invested heavily in this work. Ticket systems make sure no request gets lost. Portals ask for the right details, workflows route requests to the right group, and chatbots find the matching guide in seconds.
All of that organizes the work. A person still takes the last step: connecting to the laptop and restarting the service. When the chatbot sends a seven-step guide, the employee works through it herself. Or she gives up at step three and calls the help desk.
That's why the effort barely drops, despite all those systems. A ticket system shows exactly how long a case has been waiting. That alone doesn't resolve it.
One case, finished
Monday, just after eight. An employee writes in Microsoft Teams: "VPN drops after standby." nara asks which laptop is affected and checks it directly, through nara Edge, a small service on your computers.
The cause turns up quickly: the VPN services are hung. nara asks in the chat whether it may restart them. She agrees. nara restarts the services, tests the connection, and she gets back to work.
The ticket records the finding, the action and the result. Nobody in IT had to step in. For nara, a case is done only when the fix has been carried out, checked and recorded.
The same goes for the other everyday repeat requests:
- If a program is missing on a computer, nara installs it, as long as it's on your list of approved software.
- If the print queue is stuck, nara clears it, with or without asking first depending on your settings, and checks that the printer prints again.
- If an ERP access request is missing the cost center, nara asks for it, gets approval from the person responsible in Teams, and then makes the change.
- For a new hire, nara creates the account and groups and installs the software before she opens her laptop on day one. When someone leaves, nara removes their access on the leaving date.
IT is where this starts. The same routine runs through purchase approvals in procurement and questions about invoices. nara automates processes across the whole company, with or without an API. You describe a new workflow in your own words. nara builds it, and you see every step, test it and switch it on.
If you promise execution, you have to prove control
Disabling an account or restarting a service on a server: nobody hands that to software just because it writes well. So we built nara to let you decide, and check, what happens at any time.
For each action, you decide whether nara runs it on its own or asks first. Approvals come from the person responsible, right in Microsoft Teams, in a chat or on a call. Every action is recorded with its time and result, in the log and on the ticket. nara Edge connects from the inside, so your firewall stays closed.
Anything that needs judgment stays with a person, such as special permissions or exceptions to the rule. nara prepares those cases and hands them over with everything it has already checked. Our security page explains how this is protected in detail.
Start where the volume is
Boring work has one advantage: it's predictable. Which requests come in most often and how long they sit is already in your ticket history. A ticket analysis works through it in one to two weeks. Then you know which requests nara should take on first and what that saves you each year.
Your team is there for the migration and the security audit. The time for that is tied up in the ten topics that come back every day. If you want to see which ones they are for you, book a free introductory meeting. In 30 minutes, we show anonymized examples from customer projects and talk through where to start.
