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Aydem Energy logoAydem Energy

OpenText™ SMAX boosts ITSM productivity and issue resolution, while elevating the user experience and improving SLA compliance

Aydem Energy logo

About Aydem Energy

Aydem Energy is the pioneering energy company of Türkiye. The organization focuses on renewable energy while working for a sustainable future and generating energy from hydro, wind, and solar sources.

Dam
  • Employees:
    12,500+
  • Group companies:
    15
  • Established:
    1980

Summary

Challenges

  • Introduce advanced approval process automation.
  • Enhance service delivery with ITIL®-aligned IT processes.
  • Eliminate manual ITSM effort through advanced task automation and AI capabilities.

Solution

  • Leveraged codeless configuration, user-friendly interface, and AI-driven analytics.
  • Ensured smooth implementation through collaboration.
  • Automated approval processes through ITIL alignment.

Results

  • ai-factory Delivered faster issue resolution
  • process Modernized ticket assignment and approval process
  • desktop Transformed reporting and auditing compliance

Challenges

  • Introduce advanced approval process automation
  • Enhance service delivery with ITIL®-aligned IT processes
  • Eliminate manual ITSM effort through advanced task automation and AI capabilities

Aydem Energy is part of an organization that encompasses 15 group companies, managing electricity generation, distribution, and retail to Turkish customers. Its IT service management team worked with an ITSM solution to serve more than 4,500 users. Aydem Energy’s IT Strategy and Governance Director, Süleyman TOSUN, explained the limitations they faced with the previous solution, “We operate in a highly regulated industry, with regular audits to ensure our governance. Our ITSM solution should support us in this effort, but we found the solution was too rigid to work effectively for us.”

He continued, “Customization was very difficult, and reporting required additional work before being useful. Any reports we generated would be available in.CSV format and provide extremely limited dashboard capabilities. We wanted a solution that would enable us to drill down into the detail behind the high-level numbers.”

Different Aydem Energy departments needed to adhere to different service level agreements (SLAs). The organization looked for an ITSM solution that could differentiate clearly between SLA requirements to ensure efficient issue prioritization and resolution. The team also wanted to align its IT processes with industry standards, such as ITIL, for enhanced service delivery. TOSUN felt that the AI technology currently available would provide the ITIL support and process automation required for this. Overall, the organization wanted to reduce manual effort to enhance the user experience and deliver more efficient service management.

Construction worker looking off in the distance

Configuring specific SMAX dashboards for different teams was effortless. Converting dashboard data into Excel was straightforward. This allows us to make critical decisions based on powerful data.

Süleyman TOSUN
IT Strategy and Governance Director, Aydem Energy

Solution

A smooth SMAX introduction focused initially on automating approval processes and implementing ITIL best practices for more efficient IT service management. Integrating service management with HR ensures efficient IT provisioning for new employees.

Products deployed

Leveraging codeless configuration, friendly interfaces, and AI analytics

Mr. TOSUN had experienced a variety of ITSM solutions throughout his career. With the support of Basistek, a local technology partner, the team evaluated several, including OpenText™ SMAX. The OpenText Türkiye team presented SMAX and, once initial interest was piqued, the Aydem Energy team participated in several more technical sessions to gain a deeper understanding of SMAX’s capabilities. IT managers and support desk employees from across the organization were involved in the process.

The Aydem Energy team appreciated the codeless configuration opportunities, the user-friendly interface, and the comprehensive AI-driven analytics and reporting functionality, especially around leveraging ITIL best practices for key ITSM functions. Once everyone was onboard, the core IT team collaborated with OpenText Türkiye and the technology partner on the SMAX implementation.

Careful documentation was a key part of the success of the implementation. Basistek’s ITIL - ITSM Unit Manager Erdinç Öztürk commented on their role, “We created a full scope and analysis document outlining the processes, workflow, and reports associated with any given ITSM function. We then detailed step-by-step test scenarios to ensure that SMAX could emulate existing processes, as well as introduce new automation. Finally, we created documentation to support different job functions, such as administrators and support desk employees.”

Ensuring smooth SMAX introduction through training and partner collaboration

The meticulous preparation, including video and in-person training sessions, ensured a smooth transition, as Mr. TOSUN explained, “Our IT colleagues, OpenText, and Basistek all worked as one team and over a period of a couple of months. Knowledge transfer from the partner to our customer management team meant that we took responsibility for the ongoing management of the system, while the partner focused on an incremental customization project, to start adding additional value to our users.”

Aydem Energy implemented the following SMAX modules: service catalogue, demand management, request fulfilment, change management and knowledge management leveraging an extensive knowledge base, and service level management. It also introduced HR system integration and effective dashboard reporting, all serving to streamline IT operations and enhance the user experience.

Basistek’s Business Solutions Director, Erdinç Öztürk commented, "With our consultancy expertise, we successfully completed an exciting project by harnessing the advanced capabilities of SMAX. As a result, we ensured the consolidated operation of ITSM processes through a single data source.”

Automating device provisioning for new employees with effective integration

One of the important outputs in implementing SMAX was to streamline the employee onboarding and leaving process. This involved SMAX HR integration with SAP® and Active Directory with a single sign-on process. HR enters new joiner information in SAP and SMAX leverages web services to automatically raise a ticket to the relevant departments. This triggers the service management team to create the username within Active Directory and organize the necessary devices for the new employee, such as a laptop and a mobile phone. Everything is planned for the new user on their start date with Aydem Energy so that they can be productive straight away. For leavers, the automated SMAX process ensures that devices are handed back to the company and system access is closed following the employee’s last day at Aydem Energy to avoid any security concerns.

SMAX automation streamlines many of the previously manual processes the service management team was involved in. Every six months the IT team is required to check all user access rights. An automated SMAX process creates a ticket to remind the team of this, so that periodic control is sure to happen in line with company governance.

Similarly, SMAX is designed to respond to system capacity issues. For instance, if a capacity of 80 percent is reached in any of the Aydem Energy servers, SMAX automatically creates a ticket which is routed to the infrastructure team to address the issue before it becomes a problem that might impact users.

Wind turbines

OpenText™ SMAX transformed our IT service management, delivering faster issue resolution and empowering data-driven decision-making. The end-user experience is streamlined, reporting is robust, and with SMAX’s AI capabilities we continue to drive innovation and efficiency across our organization.

Engin KAVAS
CTO/CIO Chief Technology Officer & Chief Information Officer, Aydem Energy

Results

AI-driven automatic ticket routing delivers faster resolution time for over 70,000 tickets each year. Tailor-made SLA criteria ensure compliance and user satisfaction. SMAX AI capabilities are key to success and central to future SMAX plans.

Delivered faster issue resolution

Thousands of SMAX end users benefit from quick access to AI-driven search features in the service catalogs to encourage a high level of self-service. This is supported by an effective virtual agent, who communicates with users through natural language processing, allowing them to interact with the IT service management system using everyday language. Users can initiate conversations with the virtual agent to seek help, report incidents, or request services without the need to contact a human agent. This promotes self-service and empowers users to resolve their issues independently. They can also take advantage of the constantly evolving and growing SMAX knowledge base containing articles, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides.

With over 70,000 support and service requests each year, a streamlined approval process is critical to fast issue resolution, as Mr. TOSUN highlighted, “The user-friendly SMAX portal home page directs users to submit their requests in the correct category, i.e., IT security, infrastructure, network security, etc. This then automatically routes the ticket to the relevant support department for fast resolution. Users enjoy leveraging the SMAX mobile app so that they can easily submit requests within a central infrastructure.”

Improved ticket assignment and approval process efficiency

Rather than assigning requests to individuals, SMAX supports group assignments so that a ticket’s resolution is not affected by the absence of any single support agent. With 170 service desk agents, it was difficult to track the progress of tickets assigned to individual agents. Group assignment supports a more effective issue resolution workflow.

SMAX also supports task triggering, which streamlines process approvals in line with ITIL best practices. This means that if a process or request needs multiple approval levels, the automated SMAX workflow routes it through the process, sending alerts to the next approver in line, and keeping track to ensure easy and fast process changes.

Leveraging the SMAX SLA module, the team determined nearly 30 tailor-made SLA frameworks for different teams. This ensured that tickets are treated with the appropriate priority and receive a timely resolution. Mr. TOSUN commented, “After six months we reviewed all the SLA data we had captured. We utilized this to modify some of the SLA criteria, in collaboration with the relevant departments, to align with our findings. Thanks to SMAX we now have the insight we need to make clear data-driven decisions.”

Transformed reporting and auditing compliance

SMAX analytics and reporting have transformed many audit processes for Aydem Energy.

“Configuring specific SMAX dashboards for different teams was effortless,” said Mr. TOSUN. “Converting dashboard data into Excel was straightforward. This allows us to make critical decisions based on powerful data.”

He continued: “We have seen many improvements following our SMAX implementation. The end-user experience has been significantly enhanced. We can now fully support our sophisticated reporting requirements. As we suspected, SMAX’s AI capabilities are important to our success, and we already have several SMAX projects in our pipeline that will leverage this further.”

The organization plans to continue leveraging SMAX’s operations orchestration to further enhance the service management automation. SMAX has proven its worth as an effective ITSM solution, and the team now look forward to expanding the capabilities into non-IT use cases, to support corporate processes in other departments.

Aydem Energy’s CTO/CIO Engin KAVAS concluded, "OpenText™ SMAX transformed our IT service management, delivering faster issue resolution and empowering data-driven decision-making. The end-user experience is streamlined, reporting is robust, and with SMAX’s AI capabilities we continue to drive innovation and efficiency across our organization."

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