As ticket volumes climbed 20% annually, Purdue IT turned to automation rather than additional staff. A three-person procurement team absorbed a tenfold surge in ticket volume and a more than twofold increase in computer spending with no added headcount and no increase in resolution times.
With TeamDynamix, Purdue fully automated security patch deferral processing, a workflow that previously required a lot of manual work from technicians. The result is zero manual intervention, maintained security policy compliance, and skilled staff freed to focus on higher-value work.
TeamDynamix AI delivers 25% faster ticket triage with intelligent categorization and routing, and AI-generated response suggestions enable new technicians to handle tickets independently on their first day. Every resolved ticket becomes a knowledge asset, continuously improving self-service quality.
Industry: Higher Education
Previous System: BMC – Footprints
Purdue University is one of the largest public research institutions in the United States, serving tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff across four campuses and Purdue Global. For Purdue IT, that scale creates real pressure: ticket volumes have climbed as much as 20 percent annually since 2020, support requests have grown more complex, and users now depend on technology for virtually every aspect of their academic and professional lives.
“The volume increase of tickets and the complexity of the tickets is just forcing us to really look at how we do things and how we can squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of our processes and tools so that we can keep up with the changing demand,” Kevin Morgan, IT Process Manager Lead at Purdue, explained.
Adding staff wasn’t the answer. The answer was finding a service management platform that could absorb the volume and give skilled technicians back the time to focus on the work that actually requires them.
After evaluating a number of popular ITSM platforms, Purdue IT selected TeamDynamix as its Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solution, administered through Purdue IT’s Service Management Office.
Several things made TeamDynamix the right fit, Morgan said. The no-code and low-code configuration model meant Purdue’s team could build and evolve workflows without developer overhead.
The unified platform consolidated IT ticketing (ITSM), knowledge management, asset management (ITAM), project portfolio management (PPM), and AI capabilities under one roof, eliminating the fragmentation that builds up when organizations piece together multiple solutions.
The TeamDynamix integration layer enabled critical connections with Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, business center approval systems, and asset management databases — capabilities that would prove essential to Purdue’s highest-impact automations.
Adopting TeamDynamix also served as a catalyst for a broader overhaul of Purdue’s ITSM practices, aligning incident, service request, change, knowledge, and problem management with ITIL 4 principles, all of which are embedded directly in the platform.
Computer Procurement — 10x Volume, Same Team
One of Purdue IT’s most impactful projects to date involves computer procurement. Rather than asking users to navigate technical specs they don’t understand, Purdue built a guided intake form that walks users through selecting a replacement computer based on how they actually use it.
The form maps those answers to recommended devices, displays costs and specs, links to relevant knowledge base articles, and, once the user confirms, automatically launches an approval workflow integrated with Purdue’s business centers.
The result is structured tickets, consistent data, and a fully documented process without a technician managing the coordination manually.
A three-person team has since absorbed a tenfold increase in procurement tickets and a more than twofold increase in computer spending, all with no additional headcount and no increase in resolution times.
“That process alone, not even applying any AI to it at this point, has dramatically impacted our ability to keep up with the demand,” Morgan said. It’s a reminder that thoughtful process design applied to the right problems can outperform technical sophistication every time.
Security Update Deferrals with Zero Manual Intervention
Managing security patch exemptions used to mean technicians manually adding and removing users from groups in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM). This was time-consuming, error-prone work that tied up skilled staff, Morgan explained.
TeamDynamix changed that entirely. When a user submits a deferral request, the system automatically queries MECM to retrieve device information, checks the user’s deferral history against policy limits, and, if eligible, adds the device to the appropriate exemption group. When the deferral expires, the device is removed automatically, and updates proceed on schedule.
“We no longer have to manually maintain those groups, add people to it, remove people from it — but we’re still allowing users to request that break because they’re working on something really important,” Morgan said. Security is maintained. Users are respected. And an entire category of manual work has been eliminated.
“Replacing the person telling the user ‘go fill out this form’ with a chatbot that says ‘here, fill out this form’ starts a very consistent, very reliable process that is more efficient than talking on the phone.”
Purdue has deployed TeamDynamix Virtual Support Agents (VSAs) to handle common support requests end-to-end, without any technician involvement. The value, Morgan notes, is as much about consistency as it is about efficiency.
“Replacing the person telling the user ‘go fill out this form’ with a chatbot that says ‘here, fill out this form’ starts a very consistent, very reliable process that is more efficient than talking on the phone,” Morgan said.
When a user asks how to install Adobe, the VSA searches the knowledge base, synthesizes a response, and provides citations, giving instant answers with no ticket created.
Password resets, device eligibility checks, and replacement requests can all be handled the same way, with the VSA authenticating users, querying asset management systems, and triggering fully automated backend workflows, all within a single chat interaction.
Rather than deploying a single monolithic chatbot, Purdue operates campus-specific VSAs that draw from curated, campus-relevant data sets. From the user’s perspective, it looks like one seamless experience. Behind the scenes, a student at the Fort Wayne campus gets answers that apply to Fort Wayne, not responses calibrated for the West Lafayette campus.
“Depending on where the VSA is going to be launched from, it may actually be pointing towards a smaller set of data so that it’s a little cleaner and a little more clear and less conflicting information,” Morgan explained. If a campus-specific bot can’t answer a question, it escalates to a broader university-wide bot.
While VSAs serve end users, TeamDynamix’s AI works alongside technicians to reduce cognitive load and accelerate resolution.
When a new ticket arrives, the AI analyzes the description and suggests the right form type, service category, and routing destination. A connectivity issue on a Windows device, for instance, might prompt an immediate recommendation to use a specialized network incident form and route directly to the networking team. Better categorization means faster resolution and cleaner reporting data for smarter resource decisions.
The suggested response feature has been especially impactful for new staff, Morgan said. Rather than waiting weeks before they can respond to tickets independently, new technicians have AI-generated response suggestions, drawn from how similar historical tickets were resolved, available from their first day on the job.
“We want AI to do the tasks that can save manpower time,” Morgan said.
The platform also helps solve a persistent documentation problem. When tickets are closed, TeamDynamix can automatically generate a draft knowledge base article from the ticket description and resolution notes. This turns every resolved issue into a potential self-service asset that improves future VSA responses and deflects future tickets.
Throughout Purdue’s implementation, one principle has proven non-negotiable: AI is only as good as the data behind it. “At their core, AI is only going to be as good as the data you put into it or the data it has access to,” Morgan noted.
Deploying VSAs exposed inconsistencies in Purdue’s knowledge base that would have been nearly impossible to catch through manual review. It surfaced conflicts that had quietly misled users for years, and prompted a comprehensive cleanup of documentation that has benefited the entire organization.
Purdue’s CIO has also championed a “fail forward, fail fast” philosophy, the idea that launching quickly and iterating continuously delivers more value than waiting for a perfect implementation.
“We were actually pretty quick to launch these things,” Morgan explained. “We just try to maintain a high level of communication with the customers or the stakeholders that are helping us administer this AI so that we can tweak and flex and massage those things as we need.”
Purdue IT has achieved measurable, concrete results without proportional increases in staff by using TeamDynamix’s AI and automation, including:
The philosophy driving all of it is straightforward: let technology handle volume so people can handle complexity. As Morgan puts it, the goal is to let skilled staff “do the things that the AI can’t, like provide that more white-gloved service.”
