Standardised IT Service Management for Alnatura
The organic company uses Matrix42 for areas such as market systems, business applications, workplace management and IT infrastructure.
In the past, many administrative processes at Alnatura required a great deal of manual effort, for example onboarding and offboarding and the associated logon and logoff processes. The administration and billing of IT, marketing and facility management services also posed major challenges for the IT department. As a result, Alnatura was looking for a central solution to standardize IT service management (ITSM) across all locations and automate many of the previously manual IT processes.
In 2013, Alnatura began implementing an ITSM system for the first time and chose Matrix42 two years later, partly because of its holistic approach to process, license and client management. Together with the experts from Matrix42, Alnatura’s IT staff gradually transferred the functions mapped in the previous ITSM system to the new solution. Together with the experts, the IT staff of the organic food retailer actively developed the system further for their purposes in order to significantly shorten process runtimes and improve security. In doing so, Alnatura gradually moved towards offering the services of all relevant areas in the self-service portal.
Process optimization thanks to automation
Once the incident management and change management processes had been integrated into the Matrix42 solution, the next step was to further develop the IT and company infrastructure along the service process chain, from the management of contracts and licenses to the booking of services in self-service. This involved clarifying how IT should position itself in the future and how the systems in the background can operate as efficiently as possible. “From an IT perspective, the ultimate aim is for employees to be able to book their services, which are then automatically provided to them without IT having to do anything manually,” explains Andreas Köhler, Head of IT Operations at Alnatura.
The administrative procedures in connection with the onboarding and offboarding of employees are just one example of the optimized processes. Previously, it had taken several days to complete the entire onboarding process up to the finished employee account, including all authorizations. Each individual user still had to be checked and post-processed manually. Now, the entire process is automated without any additional intervention from IT – both during onboarding and when logging in and out. In 2023, Alnatura’s IT department was able to carry out around 3,600 registrations, 600 re-registrations and 1,300 deregistrations. Manually, each individual process would have taken 15 to 20 minutes. The automation of these IT processes saves Alnatura a considerable amount of time and improves quality.
Company-wide use of software
With the firmly established ESM solution, the self-service portal now covers the company’s entire range of services: from reception to the IT department and marketing to facility management and the legal department. Even the Alnatura stores are integrated into the central ESM, with 4,250 active users and almost all departments and branches. “This is exactly how we wanted to set up the portal: Everyone who offers a service in the company can connect with those who need the respective service,” says Köhler.
