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„Bee360 is our core solution for IT management that provides us with quick and effective transparency of costs, projects, resources and IT-architecture.“
Andreas Müller
Head of Information Technology and Organization bardusch GmbH & Co. KG
Textile management for European customers
Washing dirty laundry can be a neat
job – at least if you take it as literally as the textile service company bardusch from Ettlingen in Baden-Württemberg: Having started out as a „one-woman dry-cleaning business“ in 1871, bardusch now processes over 420 tons of laundry every day. Around 3300 employees ensure professional and highly efficient textile management for customers in the catering, industrial and trade sectors as well as hospitals and nursing facilities.
The company operates not only in Germany, but also in five other countries from France to Hungary. In addition to laundry, the portfolio includes the rental, repair and manufacture of workwear and protective clothing as well as the rental of sterile hospital clothing and special garments for the cleanroom area.
Overview
Customer: bardusch Group
Location: Ettlingen (Headquarters), Branches in five European countries
The Challenge: An alternative to Excel-based IT controlling; Establishment of transparency regarding IT costs, IT projects, IT architecture, and IT strategies
The Challenge: An alternative to Excel-based IT controlling; Establishment of transparency regarding IT costs, IT projects, IT architecture, and IT strategies
The Solution: Implementation of Bee360 Financial Management, Portfolio Management and Architecture Management
Benefits: A centralized solution for all IT controlling and EAM tasks, more transparency across the project portfolio, reduced time expenditure for IT controlling, better investment management
The Challenge
IT as a business enabler
„IT is a major business enabler for bardusch“
Andreas Müller
Head of Information Technology and Organization bardusch GmbH & Co. KG
The Solution: Bee360
The challenge of IT cost management
In this regard, Andreas Müller wanted to ensure greater transparency of IT costs. „In the past, we used Excel for our IT controlling,“ says the IT manager. „This approach is not efficient enough for our requirements due to the manual effort involved and is also prone to errors. It was important for us to have a reliable and simple overview of both the current costs and their forecast over the upcoming years.“
The company was looking for a tool that would provide an overview of IT costs and their development and that could be integrated with SAP in order to automatically transfer the necessary data directly from SAP.
Bee360 impresses with its functional range
Various systems were put to the test. After discussions with some of the providers, bardusch opted for Bee360. The determining factors were the broad solution portfolio, the integration capability and the attractive cost-benefit ratio.
„We were looking for a solution that would allow us to manage our IT organization holistically instead of having to use different tools for our various requirements in the areas of IT controlling, IT project management and enterprise architecture management. This is exactly what Bee360 offers us.“
According to Andreas Müller, the implementation phase went very well and went according to plan. „Bee360 supported us with a great deal of expertise and also ensured a transfer of know-how that enabled us to work independently with the solution.“
The consultants‘ expertise was particularly valuable when it came to visualizing some of bardusch‘s special features, such as the clustering of IT costs and the frequency of SAP data transfers. „It really was an insightful moment for me. For the first time, I was able to view our IT costs from different perspectives at the touch of a button, instead of in a one-dimensional Excel spreadsheet as before. This change came without having to laboriously gather the necessary information from various SAP systems,“ recalls Andreas Müller.
Control over IT projects
Bardusch wanted to gain transparency not only about IT costs, but also about the ongoing projects in the individual countries. For this reason, the second step of the project involved the introduction of Bee360 for IT project portfolio management, which had previously been managed using Excel and PowerPoint. Now, every IT project in each country is managed centrally using Bee360. The corresponding demand and resource planning is also depicted in Bee360.
Keeping an eye on IT architecture
Bardusch has also started using Bee360 for enterprise architecture management. „What systems do I have?“, „What systems do we need?“, „When do systems need to be replaced?“ are typical questions to which Bee360 provides quick and easy answers. The next step on the program is dynamic architecture planning in Bee360.
The aim is to better manage the technical necessity to do something and to identify dependencies more precisely.
„For example, if an integration platform needs to be replaced, I need to know which systems use this platform in order to understand the impact on these connected systems,“ explains Andreas Müller. „We also want to use Bee360 to achieve potential savings by identifying and centralizing redundant applications.“
Transparency at the touch of a button
Currently, there are around ten people in Germany who use Bee360 to gain the necessary overview of the IT architecture as well as IT-related costs, projects and resources.
The greatest added value of Bee360 for the Head of IT lies in the improved transparency of costs, projects, resources and IT architecture.
Forecast
„All the necessary information is now available to us at the touch of a button. As the data is automatically extracted from SAP, we now have the certainty of working with reliable, up-to-date actual figures, unlike the previous method using Excel.“ This has also improved the IT manager‘s team‘s ability to provide information to internal customers and Group management – for example, in the event of queries regarding cost developments or in the form of monthly project status reports for all ongoing projects.
„For us in IT, Bee360 serves the same role to what SAP does as a centralized IT system for the business departments“, concludes Andreas Müller.
Strategic use of Bee360 in planning
Bee360‘s areas of application are to be expanded in the future. The focus will be on strategic planning and program management in order to show how the individual IT projects contribute to the respective programs of the corporate strategy.
About Bee360
Bee360 GmbH is a globally operating independent company headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, with other locations worldwide. Since 2003, we have provided management consulting and comprehensive solutions for international corporations and prominent medium-sized companies through our Bee360 platform. This globally unique platform facilitates the integrated management of an organization, covering
all essential functions and business areas at the appropriate level, thus providing a unified perspective on the company‘s activities for all employees across the organization.“
More information here Bee360