HARTMANN – RICO a.s. is a member of the HARTMANN Group with a strong position on the international market of healthcare and hygienic products, both for personal and professional use. HARTMANN currently has production and sales organizations in 37 countries. HARTMANN – RICO has almost 1,500 employees in over ten locations in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
HARTMANN – RICO decided to make a qualitative change in the operation of its IT systems to ensure higher transparency and subsequently provide a better system for investment justification. The IT department is expected to be highly flexible especially in the area of production, where it is necessary to quickly react to the customer’s requirements. The growth of the number of IT specialists (the IT department has 25 employees) meant that the team had to be managed by processes. Radovan Fikr, the IT Manager, initiated conceptual changes in IT management with a goal of internally accounting IT services. A catalog of IT services was created, and costs were allocated to these services. HARTMANN – RICO was looking for an IT management tool that is demonstrably in compliance with the ITIL framework, has good CZ localization, has high-quality CMDB integration and is based on technologies that are already being used in the company. After a thorough selection process, it chose the ALVAO Service Desk and ALVAO Asset Management (benefits of ITAM).
In the first phase of the project, the ALVAO Asset Management Configuration Database was used to consolidate current partial databases. After thorough testing, configuration and training, this system was released into live operation. The second phase included the replacement of the current helpdesk system by ALVAO Service Desk. Emphasis was placed on the implementation of the existing IT service catalog into the tool so that:
Concurrently, the best practices of ITIL and the form of their application in HARTMANN – RICO a.s. were discussed. After approval of a specific implementation of processes, users were trained to use the created work processes and an ITIL Foundation training seminar was organized to unify terminology and views. The project included 25 internal employees and 3 external collaborators. The system entered live operation 4 months later than planned due to a requested extension of the scope of the project.
The output of the project is a comprehensible catalog of IT services, which became a part of the ALVAO Service Desk self-service portal. This led to a more thorough entry of requests – while previously there were 2,300 requests per year, after the system was implemented this number increased to 250 per week. An analysis of service criticality and the subsequent definition of SLA for incident solution were also carried out. Processes and roles in the IT team were defined, and the responsibilities of individual IT units were adjusted. The method used to transparently transfer requests between individual teams was clarified. The configuration database now contains all HW and SW of the company. The system also contains the purchased licenses. The use of SW licenses is monitored by an automated system which warns about illegal installations and hence reduces the administrative load of IT specialists.
A Timesheet system was used already from the beginning of the system implementation, and this was used to record 83 % of the total working time of IT specialists. „Today, we can easily show our colleagues in the business which services we provide to them, under what conditions and how much these cost. It is also clear what is included in a service and what isn’t,“ remarked Radovan Fikr, IT Manager at HARTMANN – RICO. The organization of the team has improved considerably. IT employees are led to the correct realization of tasks based on processes. The conditioned completion of items based on individual process steps also helps significantly. „The new system clearly shows me what each team member is working on. This significantly helps me direct the capacity of the team to the current tasks required by our business,“ adds Radovan Fikr. Users recorded an improvement in the delivery of IT services. An easy-to-navigate service catalog, which is intelligible and designed for use in business, unified the views of the IT team and users. „The new IT service catalog is easy to navigate and users can more easily assign tasks to their proper places. Requests are then directly transferred to the correct team, which has a positive impact on their solution time,“ says Martin Musil, IS-NCS Manager, HARTMANN – RICO.
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