Rapid growth brought major changes to data center distributor TIM. To support further expansion and boost flexibility, the company wanted to standardize processes and simplify onboarding of new staff.

By choosing the cloud-based, user-friendly IBM® Blueworks Live™ solution, TIM gained the capabilities to capture and manage processes collaboratively across all departments.

In recent years, TIM AG has successfully sustained consistent growth rates. The company plans to take advantage of any opportunities for future growth.

To meet its aim, the company’s management turned its lens inwards. Specifically, it wanted to continually analyze and—taking advantage of employees’ knowledge and experience—optimize business processes.

Christian Franzen, Team Leader for Internal Sales and Process Management at TIM, explains: “To meet the demands of larger business volumes, we frequently hire new members of staff. Our customers expect these employees to demonstrate a high level of competency. What’s more, we continually strive to reduce the time taken to onboard new staff to take advantage of their capacity faster.

“At the same time, we aim to further boost employee productivity and company efficiency as we grow. It’s precisely that efficiency that we pass on to our customers.”

To overcome these challenges, TIM began searching for a new process-management solution that could provide the best possible support for its approach and future plans. Christian Franzen adds: “We want to enable all staff to actively participate. They should be able to simply raise suggestions for improvements, without having to waste time creating process diagrams.”

After evaluating various tools on the market, TIM selected IBM Blueworks Live as the basis for transforming its approach to business process management to prepare for future growth.

“We chose IBM Blueworks Live because it offers the process management capabilities we were looking for, and is very user-friendly,” says Christian Franzen. “In addition, the cloud delivery model helps us keep our IT environment simple. Because it is a cloud solution, we were able to start quickly, without a long lead time, upfront investments or administration costs.

“Today, all employees, no matter whether they are at our headquarters or one of our two international offices, have instant access to the latest process documentation in one place,” he continues. “We call it ‘one tool for everything’, as it offers us a centralized knowledge management tool for all processes, from holiday cover to audits.”

By automatically generating easy-to-understand flow charts, the solution helps TIM formalize and standardize processes based on best practices, storing guidelines, document templates and other supporting documentation together with the process information.

Using the REST API of IBM Blueworks Live, TIM AG automatically creates regular backups of documents and other artifacts stored in the cloud. That includes, for example, processes in the open BPMN 2.0 standard format. Furthermore, data from the cloud solution can be integrated with other applications and systems.

“Thanks to the expertise of the IBM Blueworks Live team, we got started quickly with the solution and adapted it to our needs, for example when implementing the automated local backup,” adds Christian Franzen. “It is a great product that strikes the right balance between simplicity and rich functionality.”

Now that all employees can find the process information they need in a single location, staff no longer need to check different systems to learn about specific workflows and related templates. The time they save can now be spent more productively.

In particular, TIM provides a quick overview of core procedures—which is especially useful in helping new employees to get up to speed quickly. Christian Franzen elaborates: “So far, we have received very good feedback from new staff. IBM Blueworks Live helped us reduce onboarding time by 50 percent, allowing new employees to get started faster and work more efficiently. And for managers, it becomes easier to work with growing teams, because staff can look things up themselves, instead of asking their boss for advice. This has proved to be a huge time-saver.”

Collaborative improvement

The intuitive user interface and well-designed presentation of workflows allowed TIM to speed up the capturing of its processes. Easy usability has also contributed to high user acceptance rates across the entire company.

Christian Franzen comments: “Using IBM Blueworks Live, every employee can comment on the workflows and suggest how we can do things better, enabling us to capitalize on their practical experiences and institutional knowledge. This collaborative approach has unlocked numerous process optimizations and encourages continuous improvement.”

Standardizing workflows

The clearly documented processes also enable standardization across all the teams within the company. Christian Franzen gives an example: “In the past, some teams had different processes for similar tasks. By agreeing on one standard way, we have increased productivity across all teams. This makes our organization more flexible as a whole, because it becomes much easier to hand over tasks to other team members, for instance, when one employee goes on holiday.”

With IBM Blueworks Live, TIM has gained a reliable foundation for more general optimizations of its internal workflows.

Christian Franzen concludes: “By reducing onboarding time for new staff and facilitating incremental, collaborative process improvements to increase efficiency, IBM Blueworks Live is a crucial enabler for future business growth.”

TIM AG is a leading value-added distributor for data center solutions in the German-speaking region, headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany. Employing over 160 people, the company provides a comprehensive range of products and services including all-in-one solutions to IT service providers.