About CE Industries
CE Industries is an industrial holding founded in 2018 by entrepreneur Jaroslav Strnad as a sister group to Czechoslovak Group. It operates in Central and Southern Europe across rail transport and ports, raw material recycling, energy, engineering, and an opportunities segment that includes FMCG companies in food and personal care. The group grows so fast that its own internal lists of companies go out of date within weeks. With revenue above CZK 13 billion and 3,500 employees, it is one of the major groups in its sectors.
The challenge
Luboš Vavřina's main task was to unify ICT infrastructure in a group that kept changing shape with every acquisition. Each company managed ICT in its own way, with its own processes and tools. There was no common model for delivering ICT services, no central point of contact for employees, and no view of the team's workload or the quality of support.
Asset management looked much the same. Device records were split between the ERP system and several other systems and spreadsheets. That gave only a partial picture of each item's lifecycle and made finding information harder than it needed to be.
Four problems stood out:
- No single point of contact, for ICT or anything else. Employees raised requests by phone, by email or in person. That made it impossible to set priorities, track progress or measure service quality.
- No clear picture of assets. Records of computers, phones and servers were scattered. Finding out where a device was, who was responsible for it or when it was due for replacement took real effort.
- No overview of software and licences. Nobody had a single view of installed software, licences and how they were used. That increased the risk of breaching licence terms and made it harder to control costs.
- Every company and department working differently. Individual companies and support functions such as Legal and HR each had their own procedures and tools for handling requests, which made coordination harder.
"Before ALVAO, users reported requests by phone, by email or in person. There was no clear order or structure to it." – Luboš Vavřina, Group ICT Director, CE Industries
The solution
The key decision was to build the whole group's core technology on Microsoft. ALVAO's close integration with the Microsoft environment was one of the main reasons Luboš Vavřina chose it as the foundation for support and asset management across the group.
The first step was to move the core ICT processes into ALVAO, including a service desk for technical requests. The benefits quickly became clear to both employees and the ICT team. Employees got a clear way to submit and follow their requests, and the ICT team got better control over how those requests were handled.
Once ICT was running on ALVAO, heads of other departments started looking at moving some of their own services into it. One of the most important processes to move into ALVAO was joiner and leaver management. Every start and every departure needs several departments to work together, and someone has to keep track of what is ready and what is still outstanding.
