WWZ

WWZ provides utility services such as electricity, gas, water, heat & cold (thermal lake power plant) to 70,000 households in the region of Zug, Switzerland. In addition, WWZ provides Internet, Voice Mobile, and IPTV services to more than 50,000 customers and TV signal to 450,000 households throughout Switzerland.

Headquartered in Zug, WWZ AG is a holding company owned by around 4,600 private shareholders, with almost 30 percent of the share capital held by the public sector. It employs over 470 committed employees.

The solution WWZ used before implementing 4me was TicketXpert. It was just a framework to implement incident, change, and some other management processes, and WWZ needed more than that. IT had been under pressure to deploy one ITIL/ITSM service desk solution.

With a new future-proof solution, they were looking to automate service workflows further and improve service quality and efficiency. It had to be an ITSM solution with all the ITIL-recommended best practices available out of the box. And it had to be fast to deploy and easy to use.

Industry

Energy & Utilities

Location

Switzerland

Challenges

WWZ was looking for a future-proof and easy-to-use service management solution to help improve service quality and efficiency across the company. The solution had to be quick to deploy and cover all the necessary ITIL® Best Practices.

Solution

ITSM, ESM

“All in all, the switch to 4me was very successful. The local partner was brilliant throughout, and the 4me platform meets all our needs, improving service quality and efficiency and leaving us very flexible to adapt to changing service needs as and when we need to.”

Stefan Willi, CTO IT at WWZ

The selection criteria WWZ defined were that the new solution had to be a cloud platform that can be administrated by a power user, with a local partner in Switzerland, ready to use immediately, with Incident, Change, and Problem Management processes implemented out of the box.

Cost efficiency also played an important role. A cloud service is easy to administer, with automatic upgrades. In addition, 4me comes with an attractive licensing model and regular enhancements, and new features that all customers benefit from at no extra cost.

Stefan Willi, CTO IT at WWZ, explains: “We also considered other solutions such as BMC ITSM, ServiceNow and Atlassian, but they were just too complex, too time-consuming to be introduced within this short timeframe.”

WWZ decided on 4me as it is future-proof, fast to implement, easy to use, in the cloud (no upgrades to do), flexible, attractively priced, and comes with API First technology (easy integration).

“4me ticked all our boxes and more. I was astonished by the simplicity of 4me’s user interface! It is a powerful and flexible enterprise service management platform with many standard processes already implemented, which really helps if you want to move fast.”

The team at WWZ also liked the clear structure of elements such as SLA, Service, CI’s, etc., and the fact that there are lots of functions (CMDB, Contract-Management, etc.).

The implementation was done in close collaboration with local 4me partner ITConcepts.

Services and structures were developed in workshops, the ITIL practices were implemented, workflows were implemented, and the employees were trained. This was done for two independent tenants; IT and data center services.

ITConcepts conducted an admin training for four employees of WWZ. All relevant functions and procedures were trained using a real service and implemented directly.

Request Fulfillment
Incident Management
Configuration and Asset Management
Service Level Management
Change Management

SSO, Active Directory, Event Management, SCCM, etc.

The team has received very positive feedback from the IT staff as well as the end users and service quality and efficiency have improved.

Stefan: “The IT colleagues like working with 4me and the end users are clearly happy to report their tickets via the 4me portal. We’ve seen communication via teams, telephone, or email decrease within a very short time after Go Live. The 4me portal is now channel number 1. Before, it was 90% via phone, teams, and email.”

“Everyone likes the user interface, and the way the portal can be

adapted and customized (HTML Templates) is great.”

“One of the features I also like is the Application Programming Interface or API first Technology, which works well for us. It leaves all doors open for easy and safe integrations.”

“The project was well guided by local 4me partner ITConcepts. I like working with them; they are efficient, responsive, and have excellent knowledge of 4me.”

The IT Service Desk and Data Center organization are already using 4me. More departments will follow soon.

Currently, Group IT receives around 120 requests per month in 4me. This number will keep growing as more teams and departments join the 4me platform, improving cross-company collaboration and service efficiency.

Stefan: “I like 4me for its lean interface, simplicity, the fact that it is ready-to-use, the API-first technology, and much more. And all of this comes with an attractive licensing model making it a very cost-efficient solution. As it is cloud-based, we never have to take care of updating the software, and 4me comes with weekly enhancements and new features at no extra cost.”

The real-time dashboards and reporting in 4me make everyone’s life easy and give management the opportunity to see where they may need to adjust service delivery.