Micro Focus
Dürr Dental Group

Dürr Dental Group
Success Story

Dürr Dental implemented Service Desk to provide a consistent, efficient solution for managing IT support. This helped them establish new processes for handling incidents more quickly.

"We selected Service Desk because it meets all our requirements perfectly. It is a comprehensive solution that integrates well into our existing IT environment."

RALF DURST
HEAD OF IT
DÜRR DENTAL GROUP

At a Glance

Industry

Manufacturing

Location

Germany

Results

  • Provides complete records for audits
  • Accelerates resolution of technical issues
  • Increases both IT and business employee satisfaction

Overview

Innovative German manufacturer Dürr Dental Group provides medical equipment to dental practitioners worldwide. Dürr Dental’s 1,000 employees set the standards in the industry and achieved 2011 sales revenues of 200 million in 30 countries.

Challenge

The IT team at Dürr Dental’s headquarters supports approximately 1,000 devices across the group, from desktop computers to barcode scanners. As the company grew, the number of users and applications increased and the IT team began to spend too much time on user support.

There were no clearly defined processes and responsibilities for solving problems; users simply approached someone in the IT team and asked for help. This unstructured, inefficient approach caused very unequal workloads and did not allow the team to easily provide status updates to end users.

Technicians were spending much of their time on the phone updating end users on the status of their reported errors, which was frustrating for both sides. It also increased the workload and diverted valuable resources from IT projects. Dürr Dental also lacked a central repository to document service requests and configuration changes, making compliance audits a complex and time-consuming task.

Solution

Inspired by the international ITIL standard for IT service management, Dürr Dental revised its IT support organization and implemented new structured processes to handle support requests centrally. The company needed a solution to log support tickets, delegate tasks within the IT team, and provide real-time status updates to users.

“We selected Service Desk because it meets all our requirements perfectly,” said Ralf Durst, Head of IT at Dürr Dental Group. “It is a comprehensive solution that integrates well into our existing IT environment including ZENworks Asset Management, ZENworks Configuration Management and GroupWise.”

Working with Consulting, Dürr Dental implemented Service Desk in just three days as a virtual appliance on its existing VMware ESX infrastructure.

The new IT service desk powered by our software provides a single point of contact for all end users. Employees can make service requests using a simple online form, by email or by phone. As Service Desk is a modular solution, Dürr Dental was able to hit the ground running with an approach centered on incident management with a complete track record of all configuration changes. As the company builds up skills and experience in IT service management, it will be able to implement additional features and extensions as required.

Results

The end users quickly adapted to the new processes with the help of a handbook, and a training video. “Users soon saw the advantages of the central point of contact enabled by Service Desk,” says Ralf Durst. “Now they can easily track the status of their service requests and add attachments such as screenshots when they report problems online. This increased transparency saves time and boosts satisfaction for both the IT team and the users.”

Dürr Dental has also automated error reporting from business applications. In the past, such error reports were sent to a task email account to be manually classified and assigned to a member of the IT support team. They are now sent directly to Service Desk, which automatically creates tickets and manages requests using the standardized service processes.  Service Desk saves significant amounts of time for the Dürr Dental group at annual audits. In the past, complete documentation was difficult to provide; today, Service Desk stores all the relevant data centrally and makes it instantly available to auditors.

“We are very satisfied with Service Desk,” said Ralf Durst. “We can now solve technical problems much faster, and the easy-to-use interface enables us to document and track the progress of every request easily. After successful implementation for our incident-management functions, we are planning to improve our efficiency further and extend the solution to document our IT infrastructure and best practices in the integrated knowledge base.”