The Lea Nature group manages IT support and internal services with EasyVista

Based in La Rochelle, the Léa Nature group is a French manufacturer of organic and natural products for food, cosmetics and home maintenance. Since its creation in 1993, the group has experienced steady growth and today has 2,200 employees. To improve the management of IT requests and support for them, the company decided in 2018 to industrialize its processes and began looking for an IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, choosing the solution from EasyVista. Quickly adopted, it has seen its scope gradually extend to other areas, becoming a real ESM (Enterprise Service Management) tool. Jean-Marc Bourreau, Director of IT Infrastructure and Production, and Thomas Durand, Head of the IT Integration Department within the Organization and Information Systems Department, retraced the history of this project.

“Our DOSI has around thirty employees. To support the group’s growth, we needed to replace our internal ticket management tool with an ITSM solution providing added value,” explained Jean-Marc Bourreau. The objective was twofold: on the one hand, it was to improve the user experience; on the other, to automate as much as possible the tasks with low value for the DOSI. After studying the market, the group chose the EasyVista solution.

A switch to ESM

The project started in 2018, under the code name SAMi. “We first wanted to cover the existing perimeter, then to introduce a novelty, the central access point through the user portal”, relates Thomas Durand. The solution was then rolled out to all IT support departments, in particular the two maintenance teams in operational condition. Finally, at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, other non-IT departments joined the portal: Facility Management (management of offices and the vehicle fleet), building management (requests for development, electrical network, etc.) and the HRD with the various personnel management departments. “We were initially looking for an ITSM solution and we switched to ESM along the way,” observes Jean-Marc Bourreau.

Today, a large part of the support functions are combined in a single tool, and around forty users in total use the solution. “The company as a whole is a winner,” says Jean-Marc Bourreau. A large proportion of non-value-added requests are processed automatically. The solution has also improved the experience of users, who have a single web interface in which navigation is facilitated. “Everything is organized by department, with a very clear catalogue,” describes the director of infrastructure and production. For Thomas Durand, two elements contributed significantly to the success of the project. First, the communication set up, which played a key role in user adoption. “We have produced videos detailing certain services, such as requests for equipment, the arrival of a new employee. These have enabled ITSM to take hold, for users to appropriate the tool,” says Thomas Durand. The other decisive factor for adoption was the openness to services other than IT. “Having an extensive service catalog, with a single point of entry, allowed us to transform the trial and get real traction quickly,” he continues.

Bot integrated in Teams and services weather

The team has already planned several developments around the solution. “For the transition from SAMi 2.0 to SAMi 3.0, we have planned to integrate the EasyVista bot in multichannel mode, so that it is accessible from Teams and our Intranet on SharePoint”, indicates Thomas Durand, specifying that the first cases of use should arrive by the end of the year, before defining a global roadmap. The group also wants to display an IT services weather forecast for all its support centers, in order to know in real time the status of the main services. Finally, Léa Nature wants to set up the Self-Help tool in order to centralize knowledge and make it available through the bot.