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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.