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Acun Medya was established in 2004 by creative force, entertainment and sports enthusiast, digital platform owner, and operator Acun Ilıcalı. It is a leading international production company and broadcasting group, producing worldwide formats including Come Dine with Me, Deal or No Deal, Got Talent, My Man Can, My Style Rocks, Power of Love, Fear Factor, Survivor, MasterChef, Dancing with the Stars, and The Voice.
In addition to producing daytime and primetime content in Europe, South and North America, Acun Medya produces its own sports-reality format EXHATLON and operates two national mainstream TV channels in Turkey: TV8 and TV8,5. Furthermore, it owns streaming service Exxen, Turkey’s digital platform, and recently acquired the English soccer club Hull City.
Acun Medya is growing rapidly and currently has offices in Turkey, the Netherlands, Greece, Mexico, Romania, Hungary, Malta, and the Dominican Republic, with plans for further expansion.
The main issue Acun Medya was looking to solve was organization complexity. Over the past ten years, the company has grown exponentially into an international organization with staff frequently working at offices in different countries. Some of the employees work in a different country every six months. It had to be made as easy as possible for them to get all the necessary support from wherever they are.
There is some local support for services in some countries, but in many cases, the support functions deal with requests from several countries.
Acun Medya looked at many different task and project management tools, including Monday, Asana, Jira, and Trello. They also looked at ManageEngine, but that only supports one department, whereas Acun Medya has many different functional support teams, such as HR, Administration, IT, Maintenance.
Eda Takbak Şahin, PMO and Process Improvement Director at Acun Medya, explains: “One perfect platform for all is what we were after. Not just IT.”
They came into contact with 4me via ManageEngine. Eda says: “We listened to 4me just days before we were about to sign a contract with another company, and we were convinced. We had received a good offer from one other party, but we only had one weekend to decide. We spent the weekend trying to understand 4me and changed our minds.
“In the end, we decided to switch to 4me within two weeks. It was a swift decision, but it was obvious that 4me could handle everything we needed. It is a very complete and scalable platform that provides full cross-enterprise transparency. It is easy to create workflows and manage all our services and are able to work with different service catalogs in the different countries.”
Language was also an essential function for Acun Medya. 4me supports lots of different languages and also translates where necessary. Many Acun Medya employees only work in their mother tongue, and everyone is now able to write their issue or request in their own language, and support teams respond in their own language. Everyone understands each other.
Industry
- Media production
- The Netherlands, Turkey, Greece, Mexico, Romania, Hungary, Malta, and the Dominican Republic
- Acun Medya has been growing rapidly in many different countries. It was looking for a solution to help it solve cross-enterprise service complexity for all departments.
- ESM/SIAM/Mobile
“We now have complete visibility, which is a big plus for everyone. Customer experience has dramatically improved, and it provides us with complete control of service quality and cost. We can see how services perform, which ones create value for us and which ones need improving. This will result in a lot of time and cost savings in the future.”
Eda Takbak Şahin
PMO and Process Improvement Director, Acun Medya
The implementation was done by 4me in collaboration with the team at Acun Medya. Ekrem Inan, the Service Management Architect at 4me, conducted the initial training for the small core team at Acun Medya. After that, they were able to enter all the services themselves supported by 4me. Together with the different teams, they analyzed which services they needed in 4me and the kinds of workflows and necessary approval processes. Service catalogs were created in collaboration with the different functions, and 4me then helped organize them.
Ayberk Gönülkırmaz, Process Improvement Team Leader at Acun Medya, says: “Right from the start we included all departments, and we divided the implementation by location. The Dominican Republic went first and was completed after one month. Then came Turkey. Within four-and-a-half months, we implemented all services for Turkey and the Dominican Republic. Of those four-and-a-half months, 4me spent the first two to three weeks implementing the solution, and after that, the team at Acun Medya was able to implement most of the services themselves.”
Eda adds: “The implementation really exceeded my expectations because I expected that we would analyze our workflows and services and would need 4me a lot for the implementation phase. But 4me provided us with some key pointers and, after that, it was really easy to implement everything ourselves. 4me just helped in the case of non-standard issues.”
The implementation team, which in the case of Acun Medya was not an IT team, received around 12 hours of training from 4me in the first week. The support team members only needed a one-hour training session; that was enough to get them started. They received their login and it was easy for them to find their way around the system.
In collaboration with 4me partner BilgeAdam, a presentation and a short user manual were prepared for support teams to look up things after the training and go live.
- Request Fulfilment
- Problem Management
- Incident Management
- Service Level Management
- Workflow Management
- Project Management
SSR, Active Directory, Oracle, IDM.
4me partner BilgeAdam supports Acun Medya since the go live.
Alper Önsoy, Vice President Technology Services & Marketing at BilgeAdam Technologies, says: “We have come across many ITSM/ESM solutions, but 4me is different. There are tools on the market that are easy to deploy, but they lack vision. And there are ‘big’ tools with huge sub-tool divisions, but they are difficult to use. 4me is easy to use, but it also has the enterprise vision and features.”
BilgeAdam also has a 4me account. Acun Medya raises an issue ticket in 4me, and BilgeAdam or 4me responds and offers support in 4me.
Eda says: “From our side, a small team is enough to handle it. When you understand the basics and how to create a workflow, you can create others easily. That is definitely one of the things that impressed me once we started using 4me. We can solve a lot ourselves.”
Acun Medya has found that 4me also works very well for end users as it is straightforward to use. Eda explains that they now just go to one platform and, if they can’t solve their issue in the 4me Self Service portal, their request will be directed to the right support teams.
Before 4me, they had to send request emails or apps and they were never sure who to address them to. For example, if someone had a problem with their home in a particular country, they would not know whether they should contact administrative services or the accommodation team. In 4me, this is straightforward. Requests don’t get lost in the system; you find the correct templates to open a request, and it automatically goes to the right team. Everything works easily.
The services are set up by location; If someone is working in the Dominican Republic, the location is automatically changed in the system and they get the relevant services for that location.
The end users can easily see how long it takes to solve an issue; they can follow the progress of their case as the system is completely transparent and they are kept informed at every step.
Eda says: “In our company, many people don’t have desks. With 4me, they can do everything via the app on their mobile as well. So, we see no frustration there.”
It is also very easy for support team to report on the workload now, including how much they process per month, what the status is, and so on.
Eda says: “We now have complete visibility, which is a big plus for everyone. Customer experience has dramatically improved, and it provides us with complete control of service quality and cost. We can see how services perform, which ones create value for us and which ones need improving. This will result in a lot of time and cost savings in the future.”
Many different functions and different workflows are supported in 4me. Acun Medya currently has 110 service instances in 4me for nine different functions. Over 2,000 employees are supported in 4me in their own language, and the total number of employees that support those functions is around 150.
Eda explains: “Around 3,000 requests per month are being handled in 4me, which in this case is a good thing as people are adopting the system and everything is being channeled through the one platform. We now see, team by team, what people are working on and what the satisfaction levels are. We have the chance to improve the quality of the services delivered where necessary, so the customer experience goes up.
“The service catalogs play an important role. Based on the different locations and services, they make things much clearer and, as a result, the user experience has improved.
Because of our understanding of the product, we were able to analyze what we needed where and be more agile. Because we can implement case by case, there is no need to wait for everything to be ready.”
Eda emphasizes that Acun Medya uses 4me for its complete enterprise service management as the intention of the entire project was to reduce service complexity across the enterprise. IT is just one of the many departments that use the platform. Some 80 percent of the usage is non-IT. The different departments that use 4me are Administrative Affairs, IT, HR, ERP, CDM, Accommodation & Travel, Security Services, and Healthcare. And more are set to follow.
Eda says: “By implementing this tool, we have been able to improve all our processes. It is easy for us to create workflows; there is no need to have coding capability. An analytical mindset is enough to understand how it operates. We can implement most of the things ourselves but, when necessary, we receive excellent support from 4me, they are very accessible.”
“I would recommend 4me to any company looking to transform their enterprise service management and simplify and improve processes. It provides complete cross-company visibility, is easy and fast to implement, user-friendly, and highly scalable.”
Eda Takbak Şahin
PMO and Process Improvement Director
Acun Medya
