Lucas Restaurants is one of Melbourne's leading hospitality groups, operating a portfolio of well-known venues across Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra. Supported by a lean IT team of five and a hybrid environment spanning on-premises and cloud systems, the organization depends on fast, reliable IT services to keep its restaurants and corporate teams running smoothly.
The challenge: Supporting a growing hospitality business without adding IT overhead
Paul Clifford, head of technical services at Lucas Restaurants, has spent more than three decades in IT, which is long enough to know that a service desk keeps a business moving or quietly holds it back. At a fast-growing hospitality group like Lucas Restaurants, where a problem during service can't wait until tomorrow, he needed the former: A platform that resolved issues quickly, ran reliably, and could integrate into business operations.
"We're not a restaurant business where we can afford to wait a day or longer," Clifford said. "That's one of my specific pain points."
The discovery: A trusted platform, and far less manual work
Clifford didn't have to go looking. He had worked with ManageEngine since 2003 and knew ServiceDesk Plus inside out. When the previous ticketing tool fell short, replacing it was a quick call.
"There was an incumbent ticketing system in place, and I got rid of it pretty quickly and put in ServiceDesk Plus, because I know the product very well, I trust it, and I know I can rely on it," Clifford said.
Using ServiceDesk Plus, their IT team can:
- Resolve issues faster: Through a centralized platform for incidents and service requests, restaurant operations stay uninterrupted.
- Adapt workflows to the business: Extensive customization and scripting capabilities allow IT processes to align with the unique operational requirements of restaurants and corporate teams.
- Maintain accurate assets: Devices picked up by Endpoint Central flow into ServiceDesk Plus and are assigned to the right user automatically.
- Support the entire business from one platform: Facilities, HR, and food and beverage teams can manage services through enterprise service management, improving efficiency, visibility, and consistency across the organization.
Beyond the service desk, the wider ManageEngine portfolio has also helped Lucas Restaurants remove manual, time-consuming work like patch management and server monitoring processes.
The result: A fast, more dependable service desk
The result is a service desk that scales alongside the business, enabling a five-person IT team to support growing operations across multiple locations while spending less time on routine administration. More than two decades into using ManageEngine, Clifford sums up its appeal in three words: trust, reliability, and support.
"I would certainly recommend ManageEngine [ServiceDesk Plus]. It's a product that I trust and can rely on, and it's very beneficial to my team and to the company," Clifford said.
Watch as he talks about how ServiceDesk Plus and the wider ManageEngine stack keep the group's IT running efficiently as it grows.
"There was an incumbent ticketing system in place, and I got rid of it pretty quickly and put in ServiceDesk Plus, because I know the product very well, I trust it, and I know I can rely on it."
— Paul Clifford, head of technical services, LUCAS Restaurants