Equipment replacement and software provisioning are fully automated from device identification through order procurement and delivery, with no manual back-and-forth.
TeamDynamix enables enterprise-wide integration via a library of pre-built connectors to common systems, expediting automation and enhancing AI effectiveness across the organization.
Using TeamDynamix AI ITSM, Vanderbilt’s AI-assisted routing is achieving 90% accuracy on assignment group recommendations, speeding up IT service delivery and reducing technician toil.
Industry: Higher Education
Previous System: Cherwell
IT professionals spend the equivalent of two to three months every year on repetitive, low-value tasks like generating reports, chasing approvals by email, assigning licenses one at a time, and routing tickets by hand. The work isn’t being done poorly. It’s just being done manually, over and over again.
Chris Bransford, Director of IT Customer Engagement at Vanderbilt University, saw this dynamic play out across his team every day. And he saw the toll it was taking on morale, on throughput, and on the kind of work his people actually wanted to do.
“When you bring in tools that can automate those types of tasks, the morale improves because you can automate things that were very manual,” Bransford said. “That automation just makes the process a little smoother and reduces bottlenecks across the pathway there.”
But Vanderbilt didn’t jump straight to automation. Before building anything, the team made a deliberate investment in standardization, recognizing that automating a broken process just produces broken results faster.
“You should never automate an inefficient process,” Bransford explained, “because the automation in and of itself doesn’t make it better necessarily.”
With that principle as a guide, Vanderbilt standardized its equipment configurations and software offerings to cover roughly 90% of customer needs, creating the stable foundation that automation requires to deliver the best results.
When Vanderbilt started evaluating IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms, integration and automation weren’t even on the checklist. What they discovered changed the scope of what they thought was possible.
“When we initially started talking with TeamDynamix, we didn’t even know that we needed that,” Bransford recalled. “When they presented that to us as an option, we’re like, yes, let’s do that.”
The constraint Vanderbilt was working around was real: a lean team without a deep bench of developers. Building custom integrations would have been slow, expensive, and hard to maintain. TeamDynamix’s no-code integration and automation layer removed that barrier entirely, giving access to hundreds of pre-built integrations.
“We don’t have a huge team of developers to do this kind of work,” Bransford said. “The ability to use no-code connectors into our different systems, that’s huge for us.”
The proof came fast. Vanderbilt identified a staff member with no prior development experience, handed them the platform, and watched. That person has “basically built almost all of our integrations and done it very quickly,” Bransford noted.
Using connectors including Oracle Cloud ERP, Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Amazon Connect, and device management platforms, integrations and automations were built and deployed without writing a single line of custom integration code.
Equipment replacement used to mean manually generated reports, email threads to track down approvals, and orders processed one at a time. “It was just a lot of one order, two orders, three laptops here, four desktops there, and tickets that match,” Bransford said. “Running all that down was time-consuming.”
The rebuilt process looks nothing like that.
Now, when a device reaches the end of its lifecycle, TeamDynamix identifies it automatically. To replace the device, the user is presented with a standardized menu of approved configurations.
Because Vanderbilt’s environment is fully Active Directory and profile-managed, the system already knows who the user is, who they report to, and who their financial approvers are. Approval workflows route through the organizational hierarchy automatically. Orders go to vendors. Devices ship directly to end users.
“As soon as you pick your configuration for the new device, all those things happen in the background,” Bransford explained. “We take all the noise of those standard orders, and we just automate the whole conversation.”
Using connectors including Oracle Cloud ERP, Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Amazon Connect, and device management platforms, Vanderbilt set up and deployed integrations and automations without writing a single line of custom integration code.
Software requests that once took weeks now resolve themselves. A user selects from a curated menu of software options. The system identifies the right license type based on the user’s role, validates availability in real time, routes financial approval through an Oracle Cloud ERP integration, adds the user to the appropriate Active Directory and Entra ID groups, advertises the software to their managed device, and auto-resolves the ticket with a knowledge article included, so the user knows exactly what to do next.
“The software is advertised to their machine through whichever management platform it needs to go through, and it gets resolved with messaging to the customer saying this license has been assigned,” Bransford explained. The technician never has to touch it.
Vanderbilt integrated its Amazon Connect phone platform directly with TeamDynamix, eliminating the multi-screen juggling act technicians previously had to manage during phone interactions. A lightweight Lambda function now captures call transcripts and attaches them automatically to the associated ticket.
The impact goes beyond technician convenience. Call transcripts attached to tickets create a richer record for quality assurance, training, and pattern identification. This was all data that previously existed only in memory, or not at all. “It just makes it easier to document those interactions,” Bransford noted.
TeamDynamix’s AI-powered triage and ticket assistance capabilities have had an especially visible impact on newer technicians who haven’t yet built deep familiarity with service categories, assignment groups, and routing conventions.
When a ticket comes in, AI embedded in the ITSM platform analyzes the content and recommends appropriate service categories, assignment groups (with roughly 90% historical accuracy), priority levels, and response templates drawn from similar resolved tickets.
“Those prompts and suggestions that TeamDynamix makes based on the tickets of your past… they’re valuable,” Bransford said. “It gives a technician a pretty good indicator that that’s where it needs to go without having to ask or slow down.”
With TeamDynamix’s AI ITSM features, new team members ramp up faster, experienced technicians move faster on complex work, and organizations implementing these tools are seeing time spent per ticket reduced by 50 to 90%, a shift that lets teams handle significantly higher volumes without sacrificing quality.
The clearest signal of what Vanderbilt has built isn’t a metric; it’s what happened to the people.
A role that once consisted almost entirely of manually assigning software licenses no longer exists in that form. The team member in that role now works in configuration management and infrastructure, contributing to the systems that make Vanderbilt’s environment run.
“Through automation, we’ve taken that position and said, ‘Okay, you can do so much more. Let’s get you into the configuration space… doing the things that make our infrastructure work,'” Bransford said.
The individual who set up Vanderbilt’s integration library, with no development background, is now a skilled practitioner. Someone the university couldn’t have developed any other way.
“For us, it’s never about reduction in headcount,” Bransford said. “We want to grow our team, we want to grow their skill set and elevate their careers. The more efficient we become internally, that’s where that space for growth happens for technicians that are just doing these manual processes.”
“You don’t grow it by count,” he reflected. “You grow them in their career and their skill sets.”
As Vanderbilt’s automation capabilities have matured, so has the way the team measures their impact. Bransford’s framework is simple: treat AI the way you’d measure any other team member’s output.
“For me, I want to measure everything AI does as if the virtual support agent is a person because really that’s what it is, it’s another resource,” he explained. “If they’re taking functions that people click on every day and they’re just doing it on your behalf, I want to measure that work.”
That framing makes the contribution concrete and quantifiable. “If AI resolves 4,000 tickets in a day, I want to be able to measure that,” he continues. “Now I can assign a value and demonstrate the impact that AI is having on our ability to deliver faster, better service.”
Bransford is candid that its journey isn’t finished. The workflows being built today, the integrations being tested, the governance structures being put in place — these aren’t endpoints. They’re infrastructure.
“We’re building the foundation for everything we want to do in the future,” Bransford said. “You build the workflows today, and you build your governance processes around those workflows in a system that you can control. Then you layer in your AI agents to allow them to execute those workflows like a person would.”
The governance model TeamDynamix enables, with defined data pipelines, action guardrails, role-based access controls, and comprehensive audit trails, gives Vanderbilt the confidence to expand AI capabilities incrementally, knowing the guardrails are already in place when agentic AI takes on more autonomous decision-making.
“With AI and automation, we just bring all those things together,” Bransford reflected. “Simple things just free up so much time from a technician perspective so they can focus on more impactful activities that have far-reaching benefits.”
That’s what Vanderbilt’s transformation is really about — not replacing the team with technology, but giving the team the tools to do work that matters.
