From Spreadsheets to Scalable Support at Max Packaging Solutions

When Max Packaging Solutions first started, there wasn’t a help desk system.

There was email.
There were spreadsheets.
And there was a small IT team doing their best to keep things moving.

At the time, that was enough.

But nearly two decades later—with nine manufacturing plants and multiple teams depending on business-critical systems—“enough” had to mean something different.

This is a story about growth, adaptation, and what it looks like when a support system evolves alongside a company—not all at once, and not without friction.

Before: When “support” meant inboxes and tabs

When Max Packaging came on board with Issuetrak in 2008, they were still a young company—about three and a half years old.

There was no ticketing system in place. Support requests came in through email and were tracked manually in Excel. It worked in the early days, but it relied heavily on people remembering:

• Which issues were still open

• Who was working on what

• What had already been tried

As the company grew, those workarounds became harder to maintain. Requests slipped between inboxes. Reporting took effort. And it became increasingly difficult to get a clear picture of what support actually looked like day to day.

The shift: One place for everything to land

Today, Max Packaging uses Issuetrak as a central hub for internal support across:

• The IT team

• A business analyst team supporting business systems

• Nine manufacturing plants, all funneling requests into one system

Everything filters through Issuetrak—issues, requests, and reporting. Not because it’s perfect, but because it provides a shared starting point.

That visibility alone changed how work gets prioritized. Instead of chasing emails or reconciling spreadsheets, teams can see what’s open, what’s urgent, and what needs to be tackled next.

The lived friction: Where the process still bends

Like many long-tenured customers, Max Packaging has grown into their configuration—and with that growth comes edge cases.

Some of the challenges they’ve identified include:

• Re-filtering and reporting dependencies
  Certain report changes depend on prerequisite updates, making it harder to apply global changes quickly.

• Manual assignment from email submissions
  Many users still submit requests via email rather than the portal. Those tickets arrive with generic subjects like “IT issue” and default to an IT group, requiring manual triage and reassignment.

• Limited automation for admins
  There’s interest in more auto-assignment options and workflow automation to reduce manual steps.

• Visibility and access control challenges
  Ticket visibility is currently tied to a single group rather than dynamically based on assignment, which can lead to issues not being seen if routing isn’t perfect.

• Approval routing and task management
  Requests that require approvals or secondary tasks can introduce extra coordination overhead.

None of these are failures—they’re signals. They reflect a system being used heavily, across teams, in real operational conditions.

A note on metrics: Visibility before optimization

Like many internal support teams, Max Packaging doesn’t track every standard KPI.

They’re not heavily focused on metrics like first-call resolution or cost per ticket. Instead, their day-to-day priorities center on:

• Seeing what’s open

• Prioritizing projects and operational work

• Understanding what’s been completed

Agents regularly report closed work to their manager, creating shared awareness without over-instrumenting the process.

It’s a reminder that for many teams—especially in manufacturing—operational clarity comes before optimization. Metrics matter, but only when the foundation is stable.

Where Issuetrak fits (and where it keeps evolving)

Issuetrak wasn’t positioned as the final answer for Max Packaging—it was a step forward from inboxes and spreadsheets.

Over time, it’s adapted with them:

• Supporting multiple plants

• Enabling cross-team intake

• Providing reporting and visibility as operations grew more complex

At the same time, conversations continue around:

• Smarter automation

• Better assignment logic for email-submitted tickets

• Improved visibility controls

• Future possibilities like AI sentiment helping make sense of vague or generic ticket subjects

That ongoing dialogue matters. Support systems don’t stand still—and neither do the teams using them.

What this story really shows

Max Packaging’s experience isn’t about dramatic transformation or perfect metrics.

It’s about growing up operationally:

• Moving from informal tracking to shared systems

• Trading memory-based processes for visibility

• Accepting that no system is ever “done”

For teams in manufacturing—or any environment where support underpins daily operations—that kind of steady, adaptable progress often matters more than flashy change.

And while Issuetrak is one option that helped Max Packaging move forward, the bigger lesson is this:
the right support system is the one that can grow with you, warts and all.