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Stern Group is an automotive mobility company aimed at people’s personal mobility. It is the second-largest automotive group in the Netherlands. Stern is listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange and realizes an annual turnover of almost a billion euros. They employ over 1850 people working in 75 business locations around the country.
Stern is strongly focused on its digital strategy. In the coming years, the company expects a reduction of physical locations and a stronger focus on digitalization. This development will be driven by the automotive market’s electrification (reducing the need for maintenance) and the growing trends of working from home and doing business online. Stern needs to be ready for change, which means complete control over and insight into all services.
For the large number of internal customers, Stern’s IT department is relatively small. That’s why they need to be agile and smart. Most processes they run are fully automated and monitored, and they are always on the lookout to further automate or simplify their workflows. Their previous service management solution was no longer up to the task.
Stern was running a combination of an outdated TOPdesk / Ivanti solution. As automation was not possible in TOPdesk, the portal was taking care of that. But automation was not the only issue: to be entirely in control of the service processes, Stern needed more transparency and better reporting.
During a long preliminary stage of seven months, Richard Moeliker, ICT Manager at Stern Groep, and his colleagues evaluated three solutions to manage their department’s services: ServiceNow, a recent version of TOPdesk, and 4me. As for all software the IT department uses, their focus was on flexibility and scalability. They picked 4me for several additional reasons.
Industry
- Automotive
Location
- Headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, plus 75 locations throughout the Netherlands
Challenges
- Stern was in need of an easy-to-use and modern service management solution that would give them back control of their service delivery.
Solution
- ITSM
“If I would recommend 4me for other companies? Absolutely, and I already did. I sincerely hope for as many companies as possible to choose 4me. It would only mean more improvements and updates from which my organization will automatically and instantly benefit.”
Richard Moeliker, ICT manager Stern Group
Stern’s 4me implementation was done in an incredibly short lead time of two months, in the middle of the Corona-crisis. This deadline was set by the company and successfully met by 4me’s partner Bright Octopus in collaboration with the Stern IT department. Bright Octopus’ standard setup templates were key in the preparation process for configuring the system. After that, and in true co-creation fashion, they set up the environment and created integrations with Jira, Azure AD SSO, and an external supplier. Together they also defined and set up all the organization’s service level agreements, that were virtually non-existent in the previous system.
“In TOPdesk we also had SLAs, but much too basic and as a result everything was constantly red, therefore red was just the new black. Now we have full insight into our service levels and we can continuously fine-tune. SLAs are now sacred”, said Richard Moeliker. “It was easy working with Bright Octopus as they are pragmatic, willing to bring their knowledge to the table, and always go the extra mile. They guided us smoothly through the whole process.”
- Self Service
- Request Fulfillment
- Incident Management
- CMDB
- Configuration and Asset Management
- Change Management
- Service Level Management
After going live, Stern finally feels entirely in control of their services. 4me gives them the right insights at the right moment. For example, they create a monthly list of the top 100 biggest bottlenecks based on the number of requests. Then they automate those processes as much as possible. This way, they succeeded in reducing the time-to-market for new rental cars from one week to one day. Stern is an agile organization, and 4me helps them improve their processes step by step. At the moment, 4me is only rolled out for IT services, which at Stern includes facilities. They are, however, already preparing to connect real estate and human resources to the system, as well.
4me lets Stern work more efficiently, as they now have a better understanding of their services, with all information readily available in one place. Their end-users can now track their own tickets, and in 92% of the cases, users are satisfied with the handling of their requests. The usability of 4me’s built-in workflows proved crucial for the IT organization’s continued professionalization, and the standard, out-of-the-box reports were spot-on for management and operations. Or, as the IT director put it: “Our employees are now more satisfied. They finally feel that the software works for them, and not the other way around.”
“4me was our first choice because it is a true SaaS solution. Improvements to the software will come automatically, and the team won’t have to waste time on time-consuming updates. Another big factor was that 4me only charges for the actual users per month and not for the maximum expected users per year, as many other solutions do. This gives us time to connect other departments on our own terms without paying for unused licenses.”
Richard Moeliker, ICT manager Stern Group
