Sandvik, manufacturer of drilling and excavation machinery, has been a Patja customer for a decade now. Throughout the years, Patja has adjusted to the needs of this global industrial company.
The Tampere plants of Sandvik Mining and Construction Finland adopted the Patja service soon after the Sandvik group had acquired the Tambere based Tamrock in 1998.
”We were seeking ways to streamline our operations. It was a rather reasonable alternative for us to outsource ICT as it wasn't the core of our operations. We arrived to a conclusion that ICT could well be managed in collaboration with partners," says MD Kari Parvento, then director of division.
After a tender process Sandvik partnered up with Fujitsu. The first Patja covered some 350 office desktops at Sandvik's three plants in Tampere. The mission critical workstations used in tunnel and drill machinery production remained in Sandvik's ownership.
”Our information systems must run 24/7. Therefore we still have to have in-house maintenance in the production end. Shut-down of servers, for example, brings our entire production to a halt," says CIO Jouni Hämäläinen of Sandvik.
As so may times before, Hämäläinen strides along the long tunnels of the test mine in Tampere. Sandvik was one of the first industrial companies to sign a Patja agreement with Fujitsu. Year by year the agreement has expanded to cover new cities and workstations. Today, the service incorporates 1,300 workstations both in offices and production sites at all of the company's five locations in Finland.
”I don't think there is one employee working for us who doesn't use IT," Hämäläinen says about the prevalence of IT in the operations of an industrial company.
Familiar on-site support knows its way in the house
Sandvik's IT manager Christer Mattson was already in the house ten years ago, when the company was adopting the Patja service.
”We also needed the Patja service to improve our work coaching. People would tug each other at the sleeve for advice, and we didn't even know how many workstations we had. We used to collect pieces of information around the organisation," Mattson says. "The best part of Patja is that now there are instructions for all operations”.
During the past decade Sandvik has gone through some heavy standardising. The Finnish sites and their operating systems have been gradually standardised. Along the way, the Patja agreement has also seen many revisions. In the opinions of the company's representatives this has been one of the best assets of the service.
”The reduction of orders is afflicting the manufacturing industry now more than any other industry. The scalability of the services is a definite necessity. Patja has adjusted well to Sandvik's global operations environment," says Jouni Hämäläinen.
Sandvik's current Patja services cover workstations and Service desk. Servers and data communications are still the company's own responsibility. A speciality of the Patja service is on-site support, which is located at the premises of the production plants. Service desk agent Arto Salminen says that besides regular support work his tasks include giving instructions to his fellow Fujitsu staff on issues related to Sandvik.
”The primary task of the Service desk is to resolve as many problems as possible upon first contact and to route certain tickets to Sandvik's own application coordinators. Service desk also manages various user account and permissions issues in collaboration with Sandvik's Sweden-based helpdesk. Fujitsu's role is clear-cut but demanding," says Fujitsu's service manager Teijo Kyrkkö.
As people at Sandvik experience it, the special characteristics of an industrial company become conspicuous only in on-site support. "Even though it shouldn't matter who we're dealing with, it has been important for us that familiar faces come and deal with our issues. They have acquired a deep insight in Sandvik's critical in-house applications and systems," Hämäläinen says.
Partner is expected to throw in new ideas
As the availability of ICT lies in the hands of not only Patja, but also Sandvik's local IT staff and the Sweden-basd Sandvik IT, clear division of responsibilities is necessary.
Says Hämäläinen: ”We have agreed on who does what. Patja established its role pretty soon.”
MD Kari Parvento says that the early phases of the new operational model entailed the processing of many change-related issues, giving up old habits and even resistance. After ten years the dissonance has worn off.
”Fujitsu does what it knows best and in turn releases us to focus on what know best. In the long run an outsourcing partner understands the company's needs even better than in-house actors. In a customer relationship the needs of the customer always come first”, Parvento says.
In Parvento's opinion, a well-oiled service generates added value to the business. In particular, Patja offers system reliability and allows the customer to focus on its core business. In the future, Parvento expects that Fujitsu's specialists will be active in developing the company's ICT. "What we'd like to see is them giving us improvement proposals in developing efficiency and productivity.”