HYDRO Systems KG develops and manufactures innovative solutions for the maintenance, repair and assembly of aircraft.

The HYDRO company was founded in 1965 in Biberach in the Black Forest. Just 10 years later, the desire to take HYDRO out into the world became the company's vision. It quickly became clear how this was to be achieved – through consistent customer orientation. With this claim, HYDRO Systems KG has grown continuously over 50 years and has developed into a market leader with locations in America, Europe and Asia. All over the world, companies in the aviation industry rely on the company's solutions in the fields of Ground Support Equipment and Airframe & Engine Tooling. Particularly with the worldwide expansion, and thus a steadily increasing number of inquiries in global customer service, a situation arose that became more and more challenging. Teams were less and less able to meet the high company demands for service quality.

There was an urgent need for process optimization and professional, technology support. Currently, HYDRO Systems KG operates nine service locations on three continents.

Since 2013, they had been using the freely available community version of OTRS, but only for technical support, i.e. only for fault reports. If, for example, a spare part was needed, it could not be located and information about what was needed was lost. All order management was still done via Outlook.
Each location and department within the entire Global Service organization had its own e-mail address and shared mailboxes were used. This was causing a lack of transparency and a severely limited overview on request volumes and workload. In some cases, it was not clear to customers which email address they should use for their various requests for spare parts, repairs, training, commissioning, support or complaints. There were too many "points of contact" for customers. It even happened that requests were sent to several teams or locations and due to a lack of transparency, work was started on them in parallel. This was not a satisfactory situation – neither for the customers nor for the service staff of HYDRO Systems KG. Requests were no longer processed in accordance with the company's understanding of service, neither in terms of response times nor in terms of transparency. Necessary evaluations, analysis and the uncomplicated collection of important key figures, for example to determine the volume of inquiries at the individual service locations, were also not possible without the appropriate technology support.

It quickly became clear to the service team at HYDRO Systems KG that, in order to meet the company's high service standards, a service management software solution would be needed to implement the necessary process optimizations.

When the decision was made to introduce OTRS as the solution for handling all communications in global customer service, the first step was to evaluate the processes currently in place and identify any weaknesses or inefficiencies. This was then used as a basis for optimizing the processes and drawing a clear picture of how the company envisioned future processes, what was important and, what really mattered in order to be able to offer customers worldwide first-class service and support. By introducing the service management software solution OTRS, HYDRO Systems KG wanted to focus primarily on its goal of providing customers worldwide with a "single point of contact". And it succeeded. Customers worldwide can now reach HYDRO Systems KG's customer service department via a single e-mail address.

There is no longer any confusion or ambiguity. The customer always places his inquiry in the right place, regardless of whether it is about spare parts, repairs, training, commissioning, on-site operations, customer support or complaints. No inquiries are ever lost. This extremely customer-oriented system requires a highly professional organization within the company and flexible service management software that can be configured to support it. OTRS was able to meet these requirements. Internally, competent and highly skilled first level support were needed, because the requests coming in via an email address have to be carefully monitored. This means that the experts in First Level Support take care of the tickets generated from the emails and do immensely important preliminary work. They check the requests and assess whether all the information required for processing has been submitted. If this is not the case, the First Level Support employee contacts the customer from within the ticket, asking queries or requesting the missing information. Once all the information is known, the agent classifies the ticket using the available attributes. This is where the agent benefits from the flexibility of OTRS, for example, by being able to add dynamic fields.

The tickets are then assigned by First Level Support to the respective service locations and even to the correct department. These are all factors that positively influence the speed of processing a request. It is now immediately assigned to the appropriate department with the help of OTRS and nothing gets lost or sent back and forth endlessly to the wrong department. The agents who then handle the request have created a dashboard with corresponding widgets using the flexibly configurable interface of OTRS. This allows them to see at a glance exactly the tickets and information relevant to their work. The quality of requests has generally increased significantly as a result of this approach.

The service concept is what counts at HYDRO Systems KG. Offering customers worldwide first-class service and support is the company's mission. To further improve this, the implementation of OTRS was an important milestone.
Through the technology of the service management software solution, HYDRO Systems KG has experienced a noticeable increase in the optimization of service request handling, whether they are for spare parts, repair requests, training or customer support.

However, the introduction and use of OTRS has not only provided technological support for existing processes, but it has also resulted in a complete overhaul of business processes. The flexibility and individual configurability of the OTRS solution made this implementation possible.

As a manufacturer of innovative solutions for the maintenance, repair and assembly of aircraft, HYDRO Systems KG has a large number of parts or equipment that need to be recorded in the system in order to know immediately which device or configuration item is involved in a service request and to process the request efficiently. Here, too, OTRS was able to provide support with its integrated CMDB. It ensures that a total of approximately 200,000 equipment parts could be recorded.

In order to be able to offer an optimal service in the long term, OTRS is used for evaluation and planning, in addition to support for all communication. It is crucial that all relevant data and information be stored and available in OTRS. For example, OTRS can be used to easily evaluate request volumes for all service locations, taking into account factors such as the number of tickets, ticket status, response times, and so on. Bottlenecks can thus be identified much more reliably and resource planning can be done more accurately, aligning service teams with demand.

It is possible to evaluate how many tickets are received for which locations, areas, products or services. This information provides information about any optimization need in terms of both personnel planning and products.
The successful introduction and support provided by the work structuring and communication solution in global customer service has convinced HYDRO Systems KG. The company is currently working on further rollouts of OTRS for all service branches. In the future, the use of OTRS may also be considered for other HYDRO Systems KG departments.