Owned and operated by Flughafen Zürich AG, Zurich Airport is the largest international airport in Switzerland. It serves Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city, and the company also has stakes in various other airports around the world.

Roland Pfenninger, team leader of IT service management at Zurich Airport, shares insights into the transition.

Employees:

1,700+
Annual passengers:

28 million+
No. of airlines served:

77

Summary

Challenges

Taking advantage of the benefits of a cloud-hosted SaaS solution.
Integrating key systems for a consistent user experience.
Integrating broad, ITIL-compliant capabilities.

Solution

Leveraged integration capabilities for cloud service management.
Achieved efficiency gains with faster resolution and fulfillment times.
Introduced service-level transparency and KPIs.

Results

Delivered ITIL-certified best practices
Sped resolution by automating IT service fulfillment
Realized scalability and cost predictability

Challenges

Taking advantage of the benefits of a cloud-hosted SaaS solution
Integrating key systems for a consistent user experience
ITIL-compliancy with broad integration capabilities

Zurich Airport works with a variety of partners, from luggage handling to car hire, duty free shops, and airport accommodation providers. Its aim is to provide a consistent service to its internal and external customers. Transparency in its governance, processes, rules, and infrastructure is key to this objective. As the Team Leader IT Service Management for Zurich Airport, Roland Pfenninger, explained, “We wanted to understand exactly what systems and interfaces we have, how these interact with our processes, what data is available and, more importantly, what data do we need to fulfill an IT order such as a workplace for a new employee.”

The team felt that structured IT service management was core to this goal. Although there was an IT support ticketing system, it was aging and provided limited integration capabilities. Because the information was entered manually, the system contained redundant and duplicate data. To create a consistent IT service management structure, Zurich Airport needed a new solution.

Zurich Airport was clear on its requirements: the solution needed to be fully ITIL-compliant and contain broad integration capabilities. It would be necessary to share data between key systems to ensure the IT service management solution would be efficient and provide insights for continuous improvement. It also needed to align with the team’s IT priorities of governance, infrastructure, and standardizing IT services. Finally, it needed to be cost-effective. After a full evaluation of the leading market options, and following a public tender, OpenText™ Service Management Automation X (SMAX) was selected.

The SMAX SaaS implementation fits well in our overall cloud-based IT strategy, and means we no longer need to worry about maintaining an on-premises infrastructure, or version upgrades. A SaaS model also gives us much-needed scalability, flexibility, and cost predictability.

Roland Pfenninger
Team Leader IT Service Management, Zurich Airport

Solution

Over 1,000 users are more productive and autonomous as a result of the SMAX introduction. All configuration items are tracked with fast configuration items detection based on automatic discovery and SLAs are met efficiently through improved transparency.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Service Management Automation X (SMAX)

Built-in AI and analytics deliver smart IT service management (ITSM), IT asset management (ITAM), and enterprise service management (ESM)
OpenText™ Universal CMDB

Increase visibility, reduce disruption, and improve change success by discovering, mapping, and managing configuration items across IT environments

Leveraging integration capabilities in SMAX for cloud service management

A project team with representatives from OpenText and technical teams in charge of the configuration management system (CMS) and enterprise infrastructure monitoring, came together to scope the main SMAX service management configuration, covering incident, problem, and change management processes.

By integrating SMAX with monitoring and alarm systems, the team automated event ticket creation flows, from fault detection to recovery, reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). With SMAX out-of-the-box integration capabilities, for example, REST APIs, and guided by Professional Services, Zurich Airport was able to easily integrate its infrastructure monitoring with SMAX to automatically update, resolve, and close service tickets raised by system alerts without any manual intervention. With an integration between SMAX and its SAP® system all organizational changes are now instantly reflected in SMAX. Whether someone joins an organization, changes roles, or leaves an organization, SMAX always has the right people context for every configuration.

SMAX tracks all configuration items (CIs) within the organization, such as a laptop, mobile phone, or server. Regardless of what system this information is stored in, the seamless integration with SMAX and SMAX’s fast CI detection based on automatic discovery make it available through a single source of truth: OpenText™ Universal CMDB. Leveraging this information, an agent can do a quick search based on an incoming ticket, for example, and ensure that the ticket is routed to the correct team for fast resolution.

Achieving efficiency gains with faster resolution and fulfillment times

With all IT services available through SMAX, over 1,000 users accessed a single portal for their IT service requests. More than 3,000 service tickets are processed each month by 130 employees responsible for ICT support and services. They are using SMAX Live Support to quickly find answers to common requests and issues and use chat to interact directly with the requesters. They can propose existing knowledge articles and other information for a quick fix and coach users in SMAX self-service capabilities.

Introducing service level transparency and KPIs

With SMAX the team could easily measure and report on issue resolution and request fulfillment times. With full service level transparency and key performance indicators (KPIs), service level agreements (SLAs) are more efficiently met and users are more productive and autonomous. Zurich Airport plans to continue expanding the knowledge article library which has provided the team with advanced search capabilities. Hot Topics Analytics enabled the team to automatically detect trends, allowing agents to easily view and analyze patterns, and to create knowledge articles or problem records based on those patterns.

Making the move to SMAX SaaS supports our corporate sustainability goals as it is much more energy efficient. I’m proud of the collaboration and the effective knowledge transfer within the project teams. This resulted in a solid service management solution that is ready for further expansion.

Roland Pfenninger
Team Leader IT Service Management, Zurich Airport

Results

SMAX SaaS makes expansion into non-IT processes easier and provides a flexible and cost-effective model so that the relatively small IT team can focus on business improvements. Advanced self-service options led to high user adoption and satisfaction.

Delivered ITIL-certified best practices

“SMAX has provided the integration capabilities we needed and supports our ITIL-driven processes for full governance,” Mr. Pfenninger explained. “SMAX ITIL-based best practices are ideal to extend to non-IT processes too, giving users a consistent experience across all services. We can also see the potential for even more operational cost savings. We look forward to introducing other business departments to all the benefits they can achieve by streamlining their processes with SMAX.”

The Zurich Airport team expanded its SMAX usage over time and now leverages the SMAX service catalog, change management, release, knowledge articles, service asset and configuration management (SACM), survey, service request, incident, and problem modules. This enables the organization to deliver modern IT services, while improving productivity and the user experience. The mobile app is also now used by ICT employees.

Automated IT service fulfillment for faster resolution

Mr. Pfenninger commented on the efficiency gains achieved by users, “User feedback has generally been really positive, with users understanding the potential of how SMAX can help in their daily work. They have benefited from efficiency gains, with straightforward incident reporting and direct access to relevant knowledge articles. We have also introduced a new end-to-end invoicing process by integrating SMAX with our relevant SAP systems.”

Realized scalability, flexibility, and cost predictability with move to SaaS

When OpenText introduced a SaaS version of SMAX, Zurich Airport was very interested. Mr. Pfenninger commented, “The SMAX SaaS implementation fits well in our overall cloud-based IT strategy, and means we no longer need to worry about maintaining an on-premises infrastructure, or version upgrades. A SaaS model also gives us much-needed scalability, flexibility, and cost predictability. This provides us more freedom to expand SMAX beyond our own ICT organization to include managing our external customers such as airport restaurants, shops, airlines, ground handling services and so on.”

He continued, “All existing data was seamlessly cloned in the SMAX SaaS environment, and after detailed planning we switched over during a single weekend. The move to SMAX SaaS was smooth and took just weeks, thanks to OpenText Professional Services. Overall, the project took less effort than expected and thanks to SaaS, we are now always on the latest version and can benefit from newly released features right away. Rather than focus on operational infrastructure support and maintenance activities, our IT team members can now focus on delivering business improvements.”

Mr. Pfenninger concluded, “Making the move to SMAX SaaS supports our corporate sustainability goals as it is much more energy efficient. I’m proud of the collaboration and the effective knowledge transfer within the project teams. This resulted in a solid service management solution that is ready for further expansion.”