From paperwork to a digital service platform
Lebenshilfe Harzkreis-Quedlinburg supports and employs approximately 1,300 people with and without disabilities. To manage the wide range of tasks in building services, IT, and fleet maintenance, the organization has moved away from using paper notes, pens, and phone calls. Today, the organization coordinates all of its technical services using the open-source software KIX and also utilizes the system as a central knowledge database and coordination platform.
Lebenshilfe Harzkreis Quedlinburg
When a sliding door gets stuck at a daycare center, a printer malfunctions in one of the workshops, or an emergency vehicle is due for its TÜV inspection, help must be organized quickly and reliably. And there’s always work to be done at Lebenshilfe Harzkreis-Quedlinburg: Spread across the entire district, the nonprofit organization operates 15 branch locations. These include four workshops for assembly work, two inclusive daycare centers, two after-school care centers, a laundry facility, a carpentry shop, residential facilities, and a paper processing plant. A coffee roastery is also part of the organization. The beans are sold in over 1,000 stores of a very large drugstore chain.
In addition, there is a fleet of about 50 vehicles. It includes not only the cars for mobile staff — such as those working in home care, assisted living, or daycare centers — but also forklifts for the workshops. And here, too, the service must be up to par whether it involves the annual vehicle inspection, upcoming oil changes and tire replacements, or repairs. To ensure that operations run smoothly across all facilities, a reliable infrastructure is needed behind the scenes. For a long time, however, work organization in technical services and IT relied largely on analog methods.
From sticky notes, phone calls and Email to digital Service Management
When a problem arises at Lebenshilfe, the IT department is the first point of contact for getting things moving. Since the organization’s founding in 1990, a system had been in place for many years: Group leaders at the branch offices would contact the IT department by email or phone. Staff members would jot everything down on a piece of paper with a pen, type the requests into the computer, and finally get the solutions underway.
“Admittedly, our approach sort of worked, but it wasn’t effective. And as our organization grew, we faced major hurdles more and more often,” reports IT administrator Maik Schmalle. “We now employ around 250 full-time staff members, and about 300 people with disabilities work in our workshops. In addition, we support approximately 700 individuals with and without disabilities, for example in our inclusive daycare centers and senior living facilities. That’s a lot to manage. But even nearly ten years ago, our pen-and-paper system was already outdated. That’s why we started looking for professional service management software.”
Open Source as a deliberate decision-making criterion
With this digital solution, the administrators wanted to address several issues at once: ensuring greater transparency of information, spending less time on follow-up inquiries, and better tracking repairs. They also wanted to optimize fleet management so they could reliably plan and document regular maintenance work.
In 2017, the search for the right solution began.
One key criterion: It had to be based on open-source technology. “At Lebenshilfe, we rely on open-source solutions wherever possible—from the operating system down to individual applications. We want to avoid dependencies, which is why European open-source software was extremely important to us,” explains Maik Schmalle.
The IT administrators quickly came across the free community version of the ITSM software KIX. It didn’t take long before they switched to the Pro version, as Maik Schmalle recounts: “After our initial trials, we very quickly agreed that we had found the right solution for our plans. The capabilities convinced us right from the start, which is why we switched to the Pro version after just a few weeks so we could implement all the configurations that were important to us.”
A platform for IT, building systems, construction management and fleet management
To make the system as easy to use as possible for everyone involved, the IT team created a streamlined interface between IT, construction management, building services, and the vehicle fleet: Employees at the facilities do not log issues or requests directly in the ticket system, but rather through a custom-developed web form. The data is automatically fed into KIX, where it is immediately assigned to the appropriate specialist teams.
This has created significant added value at Lebenshilfe: “When we administrators are called upon to handle an IT issue ourselves, the improved overview allows us to coordinate requests much more effectively and resolve multiple issues at once during an on-site visit. Plus: No request gets lost as long as the ticket isn’t marked as resolved. That wasn’t always the case with our old paper-based system,” says Maik Schmalle.
From a ticket system to a central knowledge base
The changes are also clearly evident in our vehicle fleet:
“What’s really great about the software — or rather, the open-source capabilities — is that we can customize everything to our liking and document every component, no matter how small. As a result, there are hardly any outages.” Thanks to the custom configurations, administrators not only have a comprehensive overview of maintenance histories and logged repairs, but they can also view details in real time such as missing safety vests or expired first-aid kits.
And there’s yet another benefit for the IT administrators: While the system was initially intended solely for ticket processing, it has since established itself as a valuable knowledge base. Information that used to be jotted down on scraps of paper — and could easily be lost — is now stored digitally. For example, when dealing with any issue, IT staff can now check the documented tickets to see if a problem has occurred before and what solution was used. This allows them to copy solutions directly into a current ticket, eliminating the need to write each response from scratch.
Structured services that make a difference in everyday life
Since the introduction of the ITSM software, the service provided to Lebenshilfe employees has improved significantly. But the people with disabilities we support also benefit from the structured processes. “This is an incredibly important factor, especially in our field,” says Maik Schmalle. “We simply cannot afford downtime caused by neglected maintenance.” Whether it’s buses for daycare transportation that are serviced on time, functioning machines in the workshops, or heating systems in assisted living facilities that are repaired quickly: these smooth operations ensure reliability in everyday life.
The next step
Schedule Maintenance Automatically and Work on the Go
However, the administrators do not intend to rest on their laurels. They are already planning to expand their ITSM solution. While ticket documentation for the vehicle fleet and other branch offices is currently handled via a web browser, they plan to rely more heavily on the KIX Field Service App for this in the future. The next major step, however, is to expand the system to include automatic maintenance scheduling for technical building systems. In the future, maintenance intervals for elevators, sliding doors, and other equipment will be proactively scheduled and initiated via the software. And the manufacturer isn’t standing still either: The KIX team is already working intensively on further optimizing accessibility in accordance with the Barrier-Free Information Technology Ordinance (BITV 2.0).
Conclusion
In conclusion, Maik Schmalle sums it up: “We’ve been using KIX for almost a decade now, and we’re currently running the latest version. It makes a huge difference whether you have dozens of pieces of paper on your desk or everything neatly organized in the system. Documentation, knowledge base, open source—this is really exactly the all-in-one package we needed here at Lebenshilfe.”