NAFTA Unifies IT Services on One Future-Proof Platform

OMNICOM as a premium implementation partner of Xurrent proudly presents another successful implementation story, this time for the company NAFTA.

Project background
NAFTA a.s. is an international company with extensive experience in natural gas storage and underground facilities development in Slovakia. NAFTA recently expanded into Germany, which led to the requirement to transform the local Slovak IT team into a provider of shared services for subsidiaries. Building a completely new IT support team for Germany would have been inefficient, impractical, and too costly. It also wouldn’t support future business plans for further expansion.

Before implementing Xurrent, NAFTA used Microsoft System Center Service Manager. The main reason for the change was to enable support for various business units from one support account, which wasn’t possible with the previous solution. The main goal was to create the ability to support business operations with future acquisitions and expansions into different countries.

Ivan Mazáň, Head of IT at NAFTA a.s., responsible for the project, explains: “We were looking for a solution that would allow support for different locations and countries, now and in the future, from our shared service center in Slovakia using one tool and platform for everyone. Our previous solution wasn’t suitable because it wasn’t possible to have different support groups or domains.”

Xurrent’s architecture with supporting domains is one of the main reasons why NAFTA chose Xurrent, as it allows them to be a provider of shared services with true collaboration across businesses. This is ideal for the new organizational structure. They now have a separate domain for NAFTA Speicher in Germany and one for NAFTA in Slovakia. But it’s integrated in such a way that tickets flow smoothly between Germany and Slovakia. In the future, NAFTA will expand to other locations and countries.

Implementation
The implementation took place in two phases. Germany (NAFTA Speicher) started using Xurrent® in May 2022, and NAFTA Slovakia followed in February 2023.

Ivan Mazáň: “It only took 4 weeks to implement Xurrent in Germany, which was much faster than we expected. The fact that Xurrent is a cloud solution and ready to use certainly helped. Normally, I would expect such an implementation to take about 9 months with all the necessary steps.”

For NAFTA Speicher, the team first set up a QA environment to ensure everything was working properly. After the technical implementation, a tuning phase followed. Ivan Mazáň: “When we rolled it out across the company, we expected some issues due to cultural and language differences. German employees generally refuse to communicate in English, and finding German-speaking people in Slovakia is difficult and expensive. But luckily, Xurrent has automatic translation, which allowed everyone to work in their own language, so there were no issues.”

NAFTA was already mature in ITIL processes, and users transitioned from one tool to another. Ivan Mazáň explains: “The transition phase from the old ITSM tool to Xurrent was one of the biggest challenges because people were used to working in the old tool, which was very different. Suddenly, they had to distinguish between an incident and a service request, for example. We slightly underestimated this transition phase, but thanks to the excellent support from our implementation partner OMNICOM and some training, everything was quickly resolved.”

Initial training was provided by the implementation partner OMNICOM, followed by specific training for smaller groups: administrators and managers for approval processes. Currently, training is provided by the local team.

Customer feedback
In the old tool, it wasn’t possible to request something from home. Now, with Xurrent, login from home and mobile is possible. The mobile app is very helpful for approvals in workflows, which was the biggest delay in the old tool. Now, when people need to approve something, they get an immediate notification and can approve it from home or mobile.

“Xurrent is a solid investment for the future. For us, it’s cost-effective to provide services from our headquarters in Slovakia, where experts are less expensive than in Western countries. Xurrent’s architecture with supporting domains, combined with the language function, prepares us for providing services to any future subsidiary. Everything on one platform.”

“We appreciate the free weekly updates in Xurrent; the tool is evolving quickly, which is a real benefit. Xurrent really listens to what customers need. All the improvements I’ve seen so far are great. It’s all there for customers like us to use when we need it.”

“User satisfaction is excellent. We transitioned from the old tool with rigid service access options. Since implementing Xurrent, we have seen much better adoption and compliance with standard processes, as well as faster approval of service requests.” — Ivan Mazáň, Head of IT at NAFTA

The full success story is available directly on the Xurrent website.