Toyota Motorsport GmbH is a unique high-performance testing and development facility located in the centre of Europe; in Cologne, Germany, specialising in high technology. TMG is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Toyota Motor Corporation and offers its services to external clients as well as members of the Toyota family. Toyota Motorsport first implemented Hornbill’s on-premise Supportworks ITSM solution in 2008, and in June 2018, TMG decided to migrate to Hornbill Service Manager. I asked Per Nordqvist to share his thoughts on how things have gone since the migration and this is what he had to say.
Can you give me a brief background of who you are and what your role is at Toyota Motorsport GmbH?
My name is Per Nordqvist and I’m the IT Service Manager, responsible for the technical applications within TMG.
Which Service Desk tool was in place at TMG before you deployed Hornbill Service Manager?
Prior to implementing Hornbill Service Manager, TMG was using Hornbill’s on-premise Supportworks ITSM solution.
What were the business drivers and reasons for implementing a new solution?
Supportworks is a powerful tool and we could configure it to do pretty much anything that we needed. The flexibility was its greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness. We had done so much customisation that upgrading to newer releases became increasingly challenging. Faced with the choice of upgrading to the latest version, we thought it would be a good time to look at Hornbill Service Manager, as it’s a solution that we don’t have to maintain ourselves, both from updates point of view, as well as outsourcing the maintenance of the server and database environment.
What was your first impression of Hornbill Service Manager?
My first impression of Hornbill Service Manager was that it was very modern and designed with the user in mind. You can directly spot that it has been developed by people who understand IT service management
What other solutions did you consider/shortlist before choosing Hornbill Service Manager?
We didn’t look at any other solutions. We’ve had a great relationship with Hornbill for many years, and in my opinion, the partnership with the vendor is as, if not more, important than the tool itself.
What was your impression of Hornbill during the selection process?
Hornbill clearly understand that they are providing a service, not just a tool. As a service provider, they are very responsive to questions, issues and feature requests.
What would you consider your biggest personal success coming out of the project?
For me, the biggest personal success was the added value of using a Cloud-based solution. We don’t have to worry about maintaining the tool, as Hornbill takes care of all of that for us and it frees us up to do more important work for our business.
Since you went live with Hornbill Service Manager, how has it gone?
Very good, most of our analysts needed only one hour of training to get to grips with the tool and they took to it naturally. On day one, we had over 4,000 assets and all user data set up and ready to go.
Can you highlight three things that you love about Hornbill?
The three things I love about Hornbill Service Manager are; first, the flexibility it gives us to configure anything we need in an easy manner, with simple drag and drop design. Second would be the intuitive interface, and third, the ease of use, so our analysts can just pick it up and start using it. And because it’s a Cloud-based solution, we can use it from anywhere.
If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing you would change about Hornbill right now?
I’d like snippets to be made available for other actions, such as the resolution text. I’d like more control of when notification emails are sent to the analysts and customers (e.g. call update, assigning a new task). We’ve just started to use Hornbill Project Manager and I’d like to see the app mature with some more features.
Thanks Per. We’re delighted that the migration went so smoothly and look forward to providing a great service to TMG for many more years.
About Hornbill SPOTLIGHTs
Like any company, we obviously love to tell our customer success stories, we are delighted whenever a customer agrees to participate in one of our spotlight articles. These spotlight articles are very specifically created using our customers own words, for this series we prefer their words rather than ours. Our goal is to “tell and not sell” so we don’t glitz these up with enterprise marketing words, fancy info graphics or meaningless statistics, we just document what our customers tell us and publish that in the hope that we maintain a level of on-the-ground integrity and honesty in our story telling efforts.
