Guna

"With Xurrent, it's just, well, easy. Xurrent has been a great success for IT at Guna." Francesco Rizza, IT Infrastructure Manager at Guna

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Time to find a new ITSM partner

After numerous years of ITSM services being supplied by a third party using a legacy product, a number of goals were set by the company management, according to Francesco Rizza, IT Infrastructure Manager at Guna.

Francesco is responsible for networking systems, servers and IT management at Guna, a pharma company specializing in homeopathic products. Guna was established in 1983.

Guna has continued to grow during over 40 years opening a new 65,000 sq. ft. facility in Milan in 2008 … that won an award for being the one of the most elegant industrial buildings and "one of the most technologically advanced facilities in the pharmaceutical field."

Guna offers its products in more than 40 countries worldwide, including Europe, North and South America, Russia, India, the Middle East and East Asia.

"Customization was at best challenging with our previous tool," shared Francesco, "especially with the workflow approval processes". It was just not working. We knew it was time to find a partner and a solution that would meet — and even exceed — our service management needs." 

The search was on.

From "difficult to customize and not so user-friendly" to Xurrent

The Guna team, with help from Xurrent longtime partner C.H. Ostfeld*, looked at several ITSM solutions. 

*We are truly pleased with our longtime partnership with C.H. Ostfeld, that has been with us practically since Day 1.

C.H. Ostfeld worked side by side with Guna through the entire Xurrent sales process, from demo to technical sessions, implementation and rollout. C.H. Ostfeld even helped with expanding the usage of Xurrent to Guna's HR and facilities teams.

When it came to Xurrent, Guna was particularly pleased with the user-friendly approach. "Xurrent is easy to implement, develop and customize for our needs" Francesco shared. They also liked how Xurrent includes incident, change, problem, and knowledge management and, of course the complete technology base, CMDB, and workflow management are real game changers.

Once the "ink dried" on the partnership, it was time to start implementation, which was wrapped up in a few months.

"The exceptional support from our partner, C.H. Ostfeld (an information technology and consulting company), was absolutely crucial in implementing and driving the success of the solution, delivering remarkable value at every stage of the process."

Xurrent: A "great success." 

Since rolling out Xurrent, Guna reports that the platform is highly effective in managing tickets, requests, and changes in SAP, as well as for the CRM. 

The team used Xurrent for their SAP to SAP Hana migration, end-user requests, Office 360 support, mailing system issues, and booking meeting rooms. 

Francesco points to a recent example when a plant director asked him to build a solution in Xurrent to manage potential facilities' incident requests. Shortly after, the director also requested the implementation of processes for onboarding and offboarding employees, including managing laptops, desktops, cars, and door access.

"With Xurrent, it's easy," said Francesco. "Xurrent has been a great success for IT at Guna."

Another example: Some equipment needs to be processed by other departments, such as SIM cards for phones and tablets, which the purchasing department manages. Multiple departments are involved, and approvals are needed from HR, procurement, and security. Proper governance of these processes is essential to ensure the necessary approvals and supplier interactions are handled correctly. 

Xurrent has proved to be indispensable in this process.

Additionally, Francesco cites how Xurrent has "numerous reports and the ability to build custom reports." 

"We truly appreciate how Xurrent empowers us to customize reports and create ad hoc analyses. Reports showing open requests by department and service instance are especially valuable, as are those that allow us to filter by the scope of generated requests and view all related ones. We don't have to wait hours or days for these reports either, they are immediately available in the Xurrent UI."

Guna and Xurrent … more success stories lie ahead

Francesco and team have expanded their Service Support Portal (SSP) with numerous categories and sections.

This, in turn, helps users submit more accurate and detailed requests, resulting in improved responsiveness in handling and resolution.

"The ability to include screenshots and attachments within notes or comments adds significant value," shared Francesco, "especially during the request creation phase and in the context of audits.

And the end users are happy. Feedback clearly shows users have a better overall experience and are more efficient.

Francesco identified a "pleasant surprise" since using Xurrent: users can quickly provide feedback about their overall satisfaction, which in turn encourages other users to use the system.

"This is crucial," he shared, "because there is often a gap between IT and users, with users sometimes avoiding new tools. Because tracking and measuring user engagement is important, users are encouraged to open tickets."

Bonus: Users can open a ticket on behalf of another user through either the phone or the portal.

The self-service benefits of Xurrent came to life recently when a customer had a support issue. "They used our knowledge articles to help resolve the problem. The search functionality has been well-received, and they actively promote the Knowledge Base. For recurring issues, they create knowledge articles to address these problems."

"The Knowledge Base has saved a tremendous amount of time."

As Fabrizia Cataneo, Managing Director, C.H. Ostfeld, shared, "Xurrent has proven to be such an easy way to manage all services. And our clients' end-users really appreciate having just one solution to manage it everything – much easier."

We look forward to continuing to work with Guna — and C.H. Ostfeld — as they grow alongside our platform.