Groupe Danone, one of the world’s largest food companies, has fully implemented BMC’s IT Service Management (ITSM) offering, a key piece of Business Service Management (BSM).

“Danone has been dramatically upgrading our IT infrastructure, including the roll-out of a new global SAP ERP solution,” said Michael Kollig, Danone’s Chief Information Officer for Northern, Eastern and Central Europe. “There was an urgent need for the BMC ITSM service desk solution to be in place quickly to provide ITIL-based, best practice process support for this environment. We believe in the BSM approach, and BMC’s out-of-the-box solution integration and close alignment to ITIL methodology meant that deployment time for the project was reduced from 18 months to six months — a 66 percent time saving — and, at the same time, supported ITIL best practices and therefore mitigated against risk.”

Groupe Danone is one of the most successful food companies in the world with recorded sales of €14 billion or approximately USD $21.8 billion. The project with BMC Software spanned the North East and Central European region, comprising 8,000 internal customers spread across 110 sites, 30 operational units, 21 countries, 17 languages, and seven times zones. The BMC project, completed in association with partner InfraVision, will enable Danone to increase the accountability and visibility of IT service and support and automate the help desk process to reduce costs and incident call volume.

By automating and integrating service and system management processes, Danone has dramatically reduced the overall cost of managing and supporting the company’s IT systems. Service quality has also been improved, as Danone is now able to proactively manage and address business impact and IT infrastructure events, prevent future incidents and problems with root cause analysis and reduce downtime with an automated change management process.

“Groupe Danone had as many as seventeen IT organizations operating across our organization,” Kollig continued. “Our IT was organized by country business unit, resulting sometimes in multiple IT teams in one country. We selected BMC because we wanted to be able to align and harmonize those IT processes and roll them out across the North East and Central European region — supporting as many as 8,000 internal customers.”

Luca Lazzaron, vice president and general manager for BMC’s operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa, added, “BMC Software delivers the solutions IT needs to increase business value through better management of technology and IT processes. Our industry-leading BSM solutions help reduce cost, lower risk of business disruption and benefit from an IT infrastructure built to support business growth and flexibility. Danone was able to implement a highly complex multi-site solution in double-quick time, while simultaneously mitigating the risk inherent in a large project.”