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SUCCESS STORY

Attero

Attero Switched to 4me to Get a Grip on Its Services

HEADLINE SUCCESS

FULL TRANSPARENCY AND CONTROL

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HIGH USER SATISFACTION

IMPROVED SUPPLIER COLLABORATION

A new fit-for-purpose service management solution puts Attero in the driver’s seat

Attero is an environmental company that operates in the national and international arena. For almost 90 years, the company has been active in recovering and reusing energy and raw materials from waste. Besides wind energy, Energy-from-Waste has been the largest source of sustainable energy in the Netherlands for many years.
 
Attero is the market leader in the Netherlands. Over 700 enthusiastic and committed employees process 4 million tonnes of waste per year at 15 operational waste-processing sites in the Netherlands.

Looking for a new easy-to-use and transparent tool to control the processes

Attero was used to working with an external organization to orchestrate all parties that provide services in the field of IT, including one external party that would do all the service integrations between the different service providers. However, they found that this setup didn’t support them as much as they needed it to. The organization was too diverse and complex, and they lacked sufficient grip on standard processes.

Marcel de Man, IT Manager at Attero, explains: “What we particularly missed was transparency. Which services do we deliver, what is the status and how do they perform, and are the end users satisfied with the service they get? And in asset management, what do we have? We simply didn’t have enough grip on all that. That’s when we said we wanted to manage it ourselves again, to take control.” 
 
Attero looked at a number of possible service management solutions, including 4me, TOPdesk, and ServiceNow. 4me scored best; it significantly reduces complexity and provides great value.

Marcel: “4me was fit for purpose for Attero. We liked the service-centricity and real-time insight into service performance, the integration possibilities, and the user-friendly look & feel of 4me. We felt confident it would work for us and give us back control.”

Industry

  • Waste Management

Location

  • Netherlands

Challenges

  • Attero needed a new user-friendly and transparent tool to get a better grip on service processes across the organization.

Solution

  • ITSM, ESM

“4me was fit for purpose for Attero. We liked the service-centricity and real-time insight into service performance, the integration possibilities, and the user-friendly look & feel of 4me. We felt confident it would work for us and give us back control.”

Marcel de Man
IT Manager at Attero

Implementation

The implementation was done within 8 months from start to finish, which was phenomenal given the scope of the project, which included a full-blown go-live as well as a major organizational adjustment that ran simultaneously. The whole process started in March 2020, and 4me went live in November 2020. The Pandemic had just started, so everything had to be arranged with a remote partner.
 
The IT team started with the processes, incidents, and changes. They first had a good look at their own organization, which processes they would do themselves, and which ones they would outsource. The team defined in detail who was responsible for what. Together with Bright Octopus, they developed the operational model, customized for Attero.
 
In preparation, Attero also designed the entire product/service catalog, including all the asset management they had outsourced and some 150 software packages. This job was quite complex, with 15 locations and 700 employees. Workflows were created for all of it, making it easy for the users to request things and for Attero to keep track of what is delivered.
 
The team wanted a full-blown go-live; everything had to be in 4me from the start. 200-300 standard requests/processes were defined and fully outlined in terms of workflow, and they created 10-15 integrations with suppliers. It was quite a complex scope to have everything ready from day 1, but together they managed.

Scope

  • Self Service
  • Request Fulfillment
  • Incident Management
  • Configuration and Asset Management
  • Service Level Management
  • Change Management
  • Problem Management
  • Release Management – planned

Integrations

SSO, Active Directory, and several providers with 4me integrations via Account Trusts (can be established to allow different organizations to work together in 4me) or APIs. An integration with SAP provider myBrand was a very extensive integration with its own workflows on both sides, each with its own working method but linked to each other with a workflow integration.

Training

The training was done on the fly in collaboration with 4me partner Bright Octopus.
 
For users, 4me is self-explanatory, and for the specialists and administrators who frequently work in the system, it is also easy to use. The specialists who don’t use 4me frequently and happen to also handle change management are often more focused on the content of the work and less on the tool being used properly. For them, Attero started with an online standard 4me training, and individual training was available for those who needed more help. 
 
Marcel explains: “The first months after going live, we were on top of it, doing solicited and unsolicited coaching on the job. Service Desk employees, for example, were used to working with traditional ticketing systems and needed some more guidance in the service-oriented way of working.” 

Go Live

After the Go Live, it took some finetuning and letting people get used to the new process. Now, everyone who works together with IT works in 4me, and all end users use 4me to register requests and incidents. Requests from other departments, such as HR and facilities, will follow in the near future. In addition, all substantial suppliers are in 4me for the standard requests, fully looped in, including monitoring lead times, SLAs, and costs.

Marcel: “4me is a breath of fresh air. Where before we had no insight, we now know absolutely everything about our services: the lead time, SLA & XLA, costs, risks, etc.”

Great results: Fully in control

The end users are happy. Together with Bright Octopus, the IT team created a very intuitive Self Service portal with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) with tiles people can click on. That is in continuous development. From the Self Service portal, backed by an ever-growing number of knowledge articles, users automatically get directed to the right solution, leaving them empowered.

Marcel: “The Attero IT department scores very high on employee satisfaction. Between 95-100% is satisfied. If they are not satisfied, we call them to ask how we can improve, and this really helps.”

“We have a lot of excellent metrics to show for, but you can’t compare it to before because we didn’t have much insight at the time. We knew it wasn’t up to standard before, and we were convinced that it would get better with 4me. And it did!”
 
The request forms are kept as simple as possible. Out of 8,000 tickets per year, 7,500 flow through the service management organization automatically. And for those who fall into a more complex or non-standard category, the team arranges a good intake. Often more suppliers are involved, or a user who still needs to learn exactly what the possibilities are and does not yet know what he wants. In those cases, the team will have an intake with the requestor. Once it’s all clear at the front end, the process flows perfectly.

Excellent visibility and real-time reporting

Attero is happy with the cross-enterprise visibility and SLA reporting in 4me. Every SLA is in the system, and the right real-time dashboards have been created that show exactly how things are performing at different levels. This way, the team can immediately see which service doesn’t score well. And adjust where necessary.
 
Marcel: “I really like the reporting capabilities, and the audit trail also helps us. If there is a discussion with a supplier about the quality of service, we simply say, let’s drill down into the details in 4me and see what exactly happened.”
 
“The good thing is that we now get all this information from our own tool, while before, we had to rely on our suppliers. 4me puts you in the driver’s seat. To be in control, you need full transparency on all aspects to see what has happened; you need facts.” 
 
“What is great is that 4me has improved the atmosphere in our team as well as the collaboration with the suppliers. It gives us a lot of peace of mind and insight into what we are doing. There is no more discussion about which data is right. We have one universal service truth. We just look at the 4me dashboard for the facts. It is what it is.”
 
Properly setting up asset management was very important to Attero. Because they have so many locations, business units, and diverse user groups, asset management must be rock-solid. Marcel: “If a director asks how many laptops we have in use, that’s a push of a button. Before, we had no idea. And it’s not only laptops but also infrastructure components and software certificates. We add everything we want to get a grip on as an asset to 4me.”

Marcel: “As an IT team, we have significantly improved our grip on all the standard IT processes and are self-reliant towards the supplier. We know exactly what’s happening in our service organization.”

“We’re not done yet. We are working on even more orchestration and automation in 4me; the more, the better. For different departments as well. Every service should be fully automated and orchestrated in 4me.”

“The Attero IT department scores very high on employee satisfaction. Between 95-100% is satisfied. If they are not satisfied, we call them to ask how we can improve, and this really helps.”

Marcel de Man
IT Manager at Attero

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