- Accelleron needed to quickly establish IT service management after being carved out from ABB Ltd. It faced lengthy implementation timelines and required a user-friendly ticketing tool for transparency across multiple countries and process areas.
- Accelleron used Microsoft Power Platform to create Ticket-Fox, an IT service management solution. It provides transparency across multiple countries and process areas, supports 80+ apps, helps 2,700 agents streamline processes, and resolves issues quickly.
- This service supports numerous business applications and simplifies processes for service agents and employees. The user-friendly solution can onboard new agents in 30 minutes, compared to two days for other solutions.
Accelleron is a Swiss company devoted to powering industry with leading-edge turbocharging technology. When it was carved out from ABB Ltd. in 2022, the newly divested operation needed to stand up business-critical processes, quickly. IT service management was high on the list, and Accelleron set out to find a new solution. «We had the opportunity to start fresh and organize ourselves completely independently,» says Julian Reiser, Application Owner for Microsoft Power Platform and Principal Technical Consultant at Accelleron. However, Accelleron faced lengthy implementation timelines — in some cases, two years. «What we quickly realized was how complex and time consuming it was to introduce new systems. The project faced a huge delay.»
In addition to needing an IT ticketing solution it could implement quickly, Accelleron also needed something that would suit the unique needs of its business. «It was immensely important to have an end user–friendly ticketing tool, which provides transparency about ticket status from multiple countries and in various process areas, managed by up to 26 different support teams,» explains Othi Papailiou, Head of Process and ERP Development and FLASH Overall Business and Program Lead. While it does employ some full-time IT support agents, Accelleron envisioned a support landscape where business expert employees could jump in to solve issues too, acting as support agents when and if the issue related closely to their knowledge area. As such, a high degree of flexibility and an ultra-simple user interface was essential for any ticketing solution.
Evolving from an interim tool to a permanent solution
Accelleron’s search for a new system was exhaustive, and the dedicated solutions it considered all had lengthy implementation times. «That’s when we decided to make use of Microsoft Power Platform as much as possible. We went live with an interim solution for IT service management, called Ticket-Fox, in just three weeks,» recalls Reiser. Compared to the years-long wait for an alternative, Ticket-Fox was an immediate win.
But what started as a solution designed to fill temporary gaps in service was an instant success and eventually became the company’s permanent solution. «We realized that we actually had everything we needed within Power Platform along with the flexibility to align it to other processes, all without the investment we would have to make into a dedicated solution,» says Reiser. «With Dataverse, we have a robust database at our disposal; with Power Automate we can connect and automate each of our systems with over 1,000 connectors; and with Power BI we have a reporting tool with which we can efficiently create in-depth and visually appealing reports.» Today, the IT department and business continues to refine the Ticket-Fox solution and explore new functionality within Microsoft Power Platform.
Expediting resolution times and responding to employee feedback, fast
When asked to describe the corporate culture of Accelleron, Reiser notes the company’s egalitarian approach to decision making. «We are very democratic in how we make our decisions,» he says. When creating Ticket-Fox, Accelleron solicited employee feedback and, due to the highly flexible nature of Microsoft Power Platform and Power Apps, was able to implement changes and adjustments on the fly. «People raised feedback, and we took good care of that feedback,» says Reiser, citing one case when employees asked for the ability to change the service of an active ticket. «We realized we needed a feature that would allow a user to change the service of a ticket as they learned more about the issue, for example, from expense reporting to HR,» says Reiser. «In response, we created an ‘edit’ button where users could justify why a change is needed and provide additional data so that the ticket will be automatically routed to the right support group.»
Features like this have helped Accelleron expedite resolution times. In addition to an edit feature, Accelleron also introduced the ability for employees to post screenshots of an issue directly into the Ticket-Fox interface using Microsoft Dataverse. «This was one of the features we always missed even when we evaluated other solutions, but it came out of the box with Power Platform,» says Reiser. «This is a time-saver because you do not need to save the picture; you can simply press the well-known CTRL-C and CTRL-V and you have the image attached to the ticket.»
Reiser sees the simplicity of any ticketing tool as one of the most important influences on expediting resolution times, a key indicator of success. «Resolution time is a very important performance indicator when you’re talking about incident management,» he says. «We support the resolution process by making it very easy for the different user groups to operate within the system. That means it should be very easy to raise tickets, so we created a very simple form where the user only needs to select a service and provide basic information.» This simplicity, along with using the tool to automatically collect relevant information for agents, such as line manager and location, has been well received by employees. «With Ticket-Fox, all the relevant operational information appears directly on the processing form, which means a support agent has all the information they need via this relational knowledge,» explains Reiser. «This was a very popular aspect of the new solution that further saves time.» A 2023 representative satisfaction survey found that 92% of support desk agents, 87% of application or service owners, and 81% of end users were very satisfied or satisfied with the new solution.
Building on the success of the Ticket-Fox solution with Power Platform
The company’s success creating Microsoft Power Platform solutions for financial approvals, health and safety management, and quality management gave Accelleron the confidence to also build an IT service management tool with Microsoft Power Platform. The company is further simplifying operations by hosting 40 business applications within the same environment, making use of shared organizational master data. «We’ve built a lot of new solutions with Power Platform, and most of these solutions come with certain master data that is very, very interesting for other parts of the business,» says Reiser. «We are utilizing a lot of this data across all of the applications, which is a big time-saver.»
While Ticket-Fox has become Accelleron’s permanent IT ticketing solution, the business is constantly working to refine and update the solution, a level of flexibility that speaks to the innovative potential of low-code solutions. What’s next? The business recently attended a one-day hackathon to explore the potential of Microsoft Copilot Studio in the context of Ticket-Fox. «We thought, ‘What if Copilot could collect and analyze all the data about past tickets and consult user manuals, then come up with a response to an issue that a human agent would simply refine and review?» says Reiser. While the concept still remains that — a concept — the hackathon unlocked a new way of thinking at Accelleron and served as a proof of concept for the addition of AI functionality to the company’s application landscape.
Accelleron also plans to build a configuration database to centrally record and manage IT assets and map the associated support processes, developing Ticket-Fox into a full-fledged IT service management tool. «It’s important that we develop on a platform technology that is flexible and robust at the same time. This has an extremely positive effect on testing efforts and overall development times — and, in particular, on costs,» Reiser says.
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