How Software AG built 40+ service desks and slashed response times with Jira Service Management

A software innovator leading 4,000+ employees towards a more connected future

Through enterprise consulting and software solutions, Software AG helps companies embrace digital transformation and build a data-driven way of working. 

As a team that strives to be on the cutting edge of innovation and deliver exceptional experiences, Software AG has used Atlassian products since 2020 to support their goals. In addition to building the best software for their external customers, the company has been focusing on unleashing their employees’ potential with best-in-class internal tools. 

One of Software AG’s recent priorities was upgrading their legacy on-premise tool, OTRS, which was overly manual and reliant on email to surface service requests. It proved to be inflexible and couldn’t keep up with the unique complexities and scale of an organization like Software AG.

To solve this challenge, Associate Atlassian and Alfabet Administrator Nemil Sanghrajka, Senior Microsoft 365 Automation Engineer Ilia Dimitrov, and their IT colleagues built a customized Jira Service Management Cloud solution. They launched 40 service desks in a matter of months, all tightly integrated with other Atlassian tools across the company. With a more robust, integrated service management solution, employees are enjoying faster responses, better service, and more time to focus on the work that matters most.

Software AG’s vision: service management as sophisticated as their own solutions

Before, Software AG was handling all internal service requests with a legacy, server-based tool called OTRS. The tool only existed as an integration with agents’ email, which clogged up inboxes and made customizing tickets impossible. OTRS didn’t have a knowledge base that could enable self-service either, placing even more responsibility on the IT teams’ shoulders.

Software AG’s IT leadership had a bold vision for a new era of service management. They wanted a customized, centralized platform that could automate tasks to make life easier for thousands of people across the company. 

They had a few key priorities for the new system: 

• Keep processes simple and intuitive for agents and requesters on both IT and business teams
• Keep all service teams connected to one another and to the big picture
• Build and implement the new solution thoughtfully, in collaboration with the teams who would be using it

Guided by these principles, Nemil, Ilia, and their team carefully considered multiple service management solutions, including ServiceNow and renewing with OTRS. 

Jira Service Management: connected, customized, and quick to scale

Software AG already had a decade’s experience with Atlassian products, so exploring Jira Service Management made sense. The more they learned, the more they realized Jira Service Management stood out in a few key areas.

“One reason we went with Jira Service Management was because we could customize it to complement our internal structure, rather than adjusting ourselves around a new tool,” says Ilia. “Other vendors needed a lot of internal power to get to that level of customization, but Jira Service Management could be built up fast.” 

Jira Service Management’s interface also made it easier for agents to manage requests. “Jira Service Management really opened up usability,” says Nemil. Compared to the old system, which was confined to email, Jira Service Management tickets could be easily customized with fields, dropdown menus, and checkboxes. 

Easy integration was another priority since teams across the organization rely on a variety of tools for their work, such as Workday for HR. “From the beginning, integration was one of the most important factors, which our old system couldn’t offer,” says Ilia. “Many departments needed to use Jira Service Management, and that meant opening tickets from many places, like alerting and monitoring systems.” Fortunately, Jira Service Management offered plenty of integrations, along with APIs to build more, reinforcing Software AG’s confidence that the tool would meet their needs today and in the future. 

An integrated suite of Atlassian products

As Nemil and Ilia learned more about Jira Service Management, they saw another opportunity. Software AG was already using far more Atlassian instances than they’d realized, and this was their chance to unify them. Together, Nemil and Ilia spearheaded the formation of a new “Class Atlassian” Team, which brought the company’s Atlassian products together for greater efficiency. 

Now, Jira Service Management works seamlessly with Software AG’s other Atlassian products. “If we hadn’t gone for Jira Service Management, this wouldn’t have been possible,” says Ilia. “Now, we have a tightly integrated, overarching ecosystem of Atlassian products that all talk to each other.” 

For example, a ticket created in Jira Service Management can create a task in Jira for the relevant internal team, saving teams time on manual, repetitive work. The Jira task can trigger automatically, or upon agent request, depending on the department’s individual needs. 

Customized service desks, operating in sync

Over five months, Nemil and Ilia’s team onboarded all of Software AG’s 15-20 IT teams, as well as around 20 business teams (including HR, Marketing, Finance, Logistics, and Procurement), to Jira Service Management so they could efficiently handle requests and deliver exceptional service. 

Nemil and Ilia personally configured individual service desks for every non-technical team, configuring settings, automations, and customizations that would meet each group’s unique needs, while empowering them to manage requests independently and work faster. For example, the Marketing service desk primarily handles requests for visual and video assets, so intake had to be designed around those deliverables. 

With customized fields and workflows for each service desk, employees can gather the information they need and fulfill requests faster. “Customizable ticket fields help us gather the information teams need right away,” explains Ilia. “Eliminating initial back-and-forth reduces time to resolution by a day or more.”

Nemil and Ilia also built custom rules and automations to meet each team’s requirements. For example, HR tickets can only be viewed by staff in the country they’re relevant to. Plus, by integrating HR’s Workday tool with Atlassian, onboarding tickets are automatically created when a new employee is hired.

After configuration, Nemil and Ilia personally led training and feedback sessions for each team, using Confluence to create more documentation and serve as a knowledge base for all Jira Service Management training materials. 

Empowering employees with self-service options

Tapping into the power of a single Atlassian platform, the IT team saw opportunities to build out a knowledge base in Confluence and integrate Jira Service Management with other tools to empower self-service.

For example, by connecting Jira Service Management with Microsoft Azure, employees can fulfill requests that previously required agent validation, such as downloading software or granting permission. After all validations and approvals are completed through Azure, the request is automatically fulfilled and closed in Jira Service Management.

These types of self-service workflows free up Software AG’s agents from simple, repetitive tasks and helps requesters fulfill their needs faster. 

A new era of productivity, collaboration, and efficiency

Nemil sums up Software AG’s service management transformation and Jira Service Management implementation in one word: productivity. “When you’re handling such a huge number of tickets, it’s important that everyone gets support in a good timeframe,” he says. “Only the things that matter to agents should reach them.” 

Since adopting Jira Service Management, Software AG has reached or exceeded their initial goals — and realized unexpected benefits too.

Handled 145,000+ service requests and incidents with a collaborative approach

With their previous tool, agents had to manually address every request or route it to the right place. In addition to freeing up agent capacity with self-service options, customized workflows now give agents more control to reassign tickets as needed for faster resolution.

“Before, anyone who wrongly received a ticket had to create another one, then act as a proxy between them,” says Ilia. “It was a nightmare. It led to agents often rejecting tickets and asking the original submitter to create a new one. Jira Service Management builds a bridge for collaboration between different teams.”

Resolve 10% of all requests via self-service

“Our goal was to resolve 10% of requests self-service,” says Ilia. “We started with 2%, reached our goal within six months, and have maintained it for six months since then. That’s with zero or very little agent involvement, using the automatic integrations and knowledge base.”

Reduced first response time to 24 hours – leading to happier internal and external customers

With help from Jira Service Management, Software AG has accelerated response and resolution times drastically — metrics they couldn’t even track before. “With our old system, tickets would sometimes stay open for weeks, with no response to the internal customer,” says Nemil. “Now, when you submit a ticket, you generally get a response from an agent within 24 hours. That’s only possible because Jira Service Management made it feasible to build so many custom forms, dashboards, and automations.” 

Faster internal responses also benefit Software AG’s external customers. For example, with Jira Service Management’s integrations and automation, teams can react much faster to server outages that impact their end customers. When AWS server outages occur, Jira Service Management automatically alerts on-call staff, creates tickets, and posts updates for customers via Statuspage. 

Scaled agents by 50% in three months

Software AG launched Jira Service Management with 400 agents, with plans to add 200 more. Within three months, they reached that goal and laid a strong foundation for even more growth in the future.

Bonus: more visibility to make more informed decisions

Moving from email and OTRS to a centralized service management system with Jira Service Management created an unexpected benefit for Software AG’s leadership: unprecedented visibility into IT operations.

“With Jira Service Management, it’s so easy to build dashboards and filters, get the data you need, and export it to other business analysis tools,” says Ilia. “It’s been a huge deal to help the leadership team understand how we’re doing overall, instead of siloing data by team.”  

A visionary software company, helping their people reach new heights

Software AG is well known for helping their customers “create effortlessly connected experiences.” By adopting Jira Service Management, they’re now doing the same thing for their own employees.

Today, Software AG teams are more empowered to help themselves and one another. By connecting their people and freeing up significant time for meaningful work, the organization is poised to continue delivering better experiences inside and out, even stronger software solutions, and results that drive the company forward.

Visit Software AG's case study on migrating to Atlassian Cloud Enterprise.