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Leading HVAC Manufacturer
Daikin is the world’s leading manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. Daikin Europe is Daikin’s sales, development and manufacturing headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The Daikin Europe Group currently includes a headquarters, 5 production facilities, 17 affiliated companies and 5 sales offices in the EMEA region.
The Need to Migrate
After HP announced the end-of-life of its HP OpenView Service Desk software, Daikin Europe started to look for the most suitable replacement. All the traditional enterprise ITSM products were considered, but each one of them would have required a major customization effort to get them to support the IT management processes efficiently.
“After 4me had been brought to our attention by two of our suppliers, the project team decided to take a good look at it.” recalls Geert Monserez, Department manager IT Center EMEA at Daikin Europe. “The initial responses were positive because of 4me’s speed and ease of use, but the team was concerned that 4me might not be sufficiently flexible. Our support structure in EMEA is quite complex.”
All the concerns were systematically put to rest during sessions in which real-life scenarios were used to demonstrate how they are supported by 4me without any need for customization.
Industry
- Manufacturing
Location
- EMEA
Challenges
- HP Service Desk no longer supported
- Three service desk organizations are outsourced
- SAP environments are maintained by an external service provider
- End-users located in numerous countries
Implementation
Daikin Europe had already implemented most of the core ITIL processes. The initial scope for the 4me implementation, therefore, had to include all of these processes:
- Request Fulfilment
- Incident Management
- Change Management
- Service Level Management
- Configuration Management
The implementation project was spread out over several months. During this period, most of the time was spent on the integrations. Special attention was paid to the setup of the accounts for the three support organizations. Once the integrations were built and the accounts were fully populated, the IT support staff was trained.
Training
Much of the training was conducted using 4me’s online courses. Classroom sessions were also organized for the service desk agents, specialists, configuration managers and change managers. Following the training, 4me was taken into production in Belgium and Spain, followed by Italy.
Integrations
During the implementation project, several integrations were established. The first was with Active Directory to ensure that the employee contact information is kept up to date.
In addition, an incremental export of Daikin’s service management data gets generated at the end of each day. The exported data gets downloaded in an encrypted fashion from the 4me servers using the 4me Export Monitor. Once downloaded, the data is automatically imported into Daikin’s on-premise SAP Business Intelligence (BI) environment. This SAP BI environment uses the data from 4me to provide advanced management reporting capabilities.
An important input for the Request Fulfilment process are the online web forms that Daikin Europe built using Adobe eForms. Rather than rebuilding these forms using 4me’s UI Extensions, the decision was made to pass completed web forms to 4me using the Mail API. It was an easy integration to build and it allowed the end-users to continue to use the forms they had gotten used to.
Finally, the 4me Integrations service is used to pass request and change information back and forth between Daikin and the external service provider that maintains Daikin Europe’s SAP environments. This integration increases the efficiency with which changes to these SAP environments are managed, and it provides visibility into the SLAs with the external service provider.
Solution
- Three separate 4me accounts were created for the service desk organizations
- The 4me accounts were linked together to allow them to work together
- The 4me account of Daikin Europe’s headquarters was integrated with the Jira environment of the external service provider
Results
- Seamless collaboration with external support staff who also use 4me to provide first line and end-user support
- More efficient SAP change management thanks to the 4me – Jira integration
- Ability to track performance of all external service providers
- Supporting 3000 end users across EMEA
Next Steps
The departments that are responsible for General Affairs (Facility Management), Product Engineering and EDC (R&D) have looked into 4me and also decided that it would be a good fit for them. They plan to use 4me for the efficient handling of requests related to the services they provide to their internal customers.
“Out of the box, 4me provides the functionality that an enterprise needs for all of its service desks, local IT departments and regional competence centers.”
Martijn Adams, 4me
