Scandinavian Tobacco Group

STG's plug and play: a “one process strategy” for international collaboration

When your international service desks work in different systems and have different ways of working, how do you keep track of logged incidents and prevent IT issues from recurring? You don’t. When Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG) introduced their One Process Strategy, a skilled project team from IT set out to align its incident management and change management processes and replace about 4 ticketing systems with TOPdesk.

From complexity to efficiency

One of the pillars of STG’s One Process Strategy is: simplify. But especially for IT, simplifying the existing change management and incident processes was far from easy. STG’s service desks are scattered across offices worldwide and each had their own way of working. Incidents were being logged by email to an email group, in person or in one of the many ticketing systems. Even when service desks were using the same software, they’d be using newer or older versions that weren’t compatible.

Leon van Amersvoort, Senior IT Manager, explains: “This kind of complexity is what happens with mergers and acquisitions. I’m convinced we were providing good service to our colleagues, but we didn’t have insight into bottle necks or overall performance. To help align our processes we chose TOPdesk as the one tool to support our incident and change management.” Why TOPdesk? “It is a user-friendly tool which gets the job done. It is straightforward, and to be honest – to a large extend it was their way of presenting the software that was the deciding factor. Personal, relatable and just pleasant.”

A smooth implementation

In such a complex organization, isn’t it a hassle to implement a new tool and get all processes aligned? Not as much as you’d think. The implementation until go-live of phase 1 only took less than 3 months. Leon: “We initially decided on a three-step implementation, but when the first part – all incidents regarding Sales & Customer Service – was finished, we decided to go for a big bang and get everything up and running in one go. Everything just ran smoothly. We had weekly meetings with the consultants from TOPdesk and we put a lot of effort into training to be operators, IT and key users. I think the latter has been most valuable. We now have a lot of knowledge and skill in STG, enabling us to make changes ourselves to move forward.”

TOPdesk is now being used at every office of STG, in multiple time zones across the globe, with one Self-Service Portal as the single point of contact for all IT-related issues. Leon: “If someone in the US experiences a problem with a printer, we should be able to help them from here too. With smart action sequences in forms, we made sure the incidents are categorized and sent to the correct operator group.”

A bumpy road?

From this story, you’d think that this change was a breeze, and overall, it was, but the introduction of a new tool can also provoke opposition. Leon: “I can guarantee that some colleagues are still disgruntled. They were ahead of the game and were using their systems for more than ticketing. Needless to say, they were not happy to part with their way of working. But when you select one tool for everyone, you are bound to bump heads with some people.”

Leon still feels that they made the right choice. “Using one tool all over the world has improved our international collaboration significantly. We can see how processes flow, trace incidents and appoint ownership. We are currently creating a shared knowledge base to solve incidents more effectively.”

6 months, 10,000 incidents

What about STG’s employees, the colleagues who look to IT for day-to-day support? Leon: “I feel our colleagues really benefit from the new situation. Of course, logging incidents in the SSP took some getting used to, but in the past 6 months, over 10,000 incidents were logged, of which overall over 80% via SSP – which is much more than before. This means we’re collecting tons of valuable data which we can use to optimize our processes. We are still figuring out what we need and want regarding reports and dashboards, but I am looking forward to all the improvements we’ll be able to make. We are just getting started!’