Organizational (I)Transformation powered by Matrix42
How the WITTMANN Group created a single point of contact between IT and users with ITSM from Matrix42.
A global unit for IT
Strong inorganic growth and the acquisition of the Battenfeld company in 2008 meant Gerald Danko had two IT departments to manage when he started as CIO at the WITTMANN Group in 2021. His vision was to forge a single Wittmann Group IT out of them, creating, “The best of both worlds”. As a service provider, this global unit uses its IT solutions to support the growth and success of the Group, a worldwide player in injection molding technology that operates in every important plastics market.
The use of multiple channels including three ticket systems, e-mails, teams, etc., meant there was no uniform coordination of IT operations across the company. Gerald Danko and his team started with a clean analysis of the basic processes, such as IT operation faults, using “dry training” without software, in collaboration with partner Hillside. “I had done something similar before and had very good experiences with Hillside,” says Gerald Danko about the choice of partner.
Flexibly assigning tasks at any time thanks to a unified service desk
In January 2022, the team began setting up all the processes in the ticket system. Work on the service desk started as early as May.
In the meantime, IT is working across the board, and synergies are becoming apparent relatively quickly, especially when it comes to the unified service desk. “If two colleagues in Vienna are not available, then tasks are forwarded to their colleagues in Kottingbrunn or in Germany, and vice versa,” Gerald Danko explains. Knowledge management is a key function within the Matrix42 solution. “We started by documenting how we arrive at solutions and what solutions exist overall,” says Gerald Danko, emphasizing the importance of the knowledge base. First and foremost, it’s about commenting on more complex tickets in the follow-up and tagging them so that others with a similar problem can learn from them. It’s not just the IT department that benefits from this feature.
Breaking down silos and promoting active team building
The real challenge in software-based business process optimization is corporate culture. It’s only human that everyone has built their own sanctuary in their own location. “In the beginning, I always heard, ‘No, there’s no way we can help each other, it’s very different there than it is here.’ Of course, I can’t expect one colleague to be able to support another at a different site from one day to the next,” Danko says. Team building activities are therefore taking place behind the scenes to encourage everyone involved to work together.
Web frontend and onboaring process for users
The next goal is to unlock the Service Portal, which users can use to report faults. "Many of our customers don't know what a service portal is. That's why we are planning to launch a big information campaign. We will inform customers what the Service Portal is, what happens in the background and why it makes sense to use it," says Gerald Dunko. The advantages are obvious: users benefit from good traceability and transparency.
Later in the summer, the onboarding process can be used to order services such as hardware and access authorizations with a simple approval workflow. The ticket system is currently being set up manually in Matrix42 and will run automatically via the Service Portal in the future. There, users will see their open tickets and the respective processing status. Ultimately it will be possible to order hardware, add users and assign authorizations automatically during the onboarding process. As a result, WITTMANN benefits from time savings, shorter process runtimes, lower costs due to the elimination of redundant systems, and improved compliance and security processes.
