Implementing Policy › Service Level Agreements › Service Contracts

Service Contracts

The SLA model includes the Service Contract. The Service Contract defines the SLA for a particular organization, including its Service Types, Request areas, and Issue or Change Categories. These definitions are referred to as private Categories and private Service Types.

Note: The private Categories and Service Types can only be used on tickets where the Service Contract is used.

The Service Contract applicable to a ticket is determined by the ticket’s affected organization, which is always the Organization of the Affected End User on the ticket (this is the Organization field on a Contact record). Only the Areas or Categories listed on the Service Contract can be selected for the ticket. In addition, the only Service Types that can be applied are the private ones listed on the Contract. This helps ensure that the SLAs for one Organization are not accidentally mixed with another’s.

A Service Contract also maps Service Types to common reference fields on a ticket, such as Priority and Asset. This mapping associates Service Types with attributes of a ticket. For example, an Organization’s contract can assign Service Types to each of the five Priority objects. When a ticket is created with a certain priority, the mapped Service Type is applied.

Categories and Service Types can be defined outside of a Contract and are considered public. The public definitions are used when a ticket has no Service Contract. The lack of a Service Contract can occur if the end user has no organization, or the organization’s Contract is inactive. A public definition is a helpful backup or default mechanism. Public Service Types are set directly on categories and other reference field objects.

All applicable Service Types are assigned to the ticket. This ensures that all aspects of an SLA are visible and enforced, for example:

• A Printer may have a Service Type that requires a technician to be dispatched within two days.
• A priority object’s Service Type may require a callback within one hour.

With both Service Types applied, these required actions are enforced.

Tracking multiple Service Types also helps prioritize tickets. For example, a ticket concerning a broken keyboard is assigned a low priority Service Type. However, if the affected end user is in urgent need of the keyboard, the service priority can be increased.

Note: The SLA model is enforced by default. Past versions of CA SDM applied only a single Service Type to a ticket. The Service Type selection involved finding the highest ranked Type among all the possible Service Types. A model using the ranking scheme can still be used by installing the Option ‘classic_sla_processing’.