Three Companies, One BCS: Managing IT Support Across Companies

We have been operating as an IT service provider in Karlsruhe for more than 25 years. Our passion is the digital transformation of business processes, particularly for small and midsize businesses and public-sector organizations. Other key areas include cybersecurity, modern collaboration solutions, and IT infrastructure.

Our goal is not only to support our customers from a technical perspective, but also to guide them as a trusted partner throughout their digital transformation. Today, more than 280 customers and over 400 projects reflect the experience we have gained across different industries and organizational structures.

We see digital transformation as an end-to-end process. It begins with a collaborative workshop in which we analyze requirements, challenges, and opportunities for improvement. Based on these findings, we develop a tailored concept, select suitable technologies, and support implementation through integration into the existing IT environment.

I supported the implementation of BCS at n-komm around six years ago. We started with the goal of structuring project planning and execution more effectively while making our support processes even more centralized and transparent.

Today, we use BCS in several areas. One key focus is the planning and execution of our IT projects. We also use it for time tracking, absences, vacation requests, and sick leave, including calendar synchronization with Microsoft 365.

However, the ticketing system is the most important operational area for us. We use it both internally and externally, including customer access. This provides a major advantage for our support work: customers can submit requests in a structured way, agents can take over, forward, and document tickets, and we always retain an overview of status, responsibilities, and history.

BCS therefore supports us not only in individual processes. It has become a shared work platform for project teams, support, internal organization, and collaboration across company boundaries.

Initial Situation: Three Companies, Three Customer Databases, One Shared Support Standard

As the n-komm Group grew, we faced a typical challenge: each company brought its own history, customer structures, and systems.

We had customer data from three different sources and companies: n-komm Odoo, TSP-GIS Odoo, and a Notes application used by WITS. These data sets were imported separately into ELO and remained separated there.

This created several challenges. The same customer could appear multiple times, depending on the source system or company. A customer could therefore be listed among n-komm customers, TSP customers, and WITS customers.

For the next step toward BCS, simply transferring the data was not sufficient. We first had to determine which customer records belonged together, which were true duplicates, which needed to remain separate, and how to create a consistent, clean customer structure in ELO that BCS could subsequently use correctly.

We therefore deliberately selected only customer data from ELO for import into BCS. Suppliers were not imported. At the same time, we had to take into account that some customers were active with several companies and therefore appeared multiple times in the historical data.

Consolidating Customer Data: Email Address as the Connecting Identifier

In practice, it quickly became clear that importing customer and contact data is not merely a technical task. It also requires the right business logic.

One challenge was that customers and contacts sometimes existed more than once. When a customer had been created in the legacy systems of n-komm, T.S.P., and Wilsch IT-Services, the customer could be imported multiple times. At the same time, a user account can exist only once in BCS.

The solution was to uniquely identify customers and contacts by their email addresses. This allowed us to ensure that they were imported only once and that duplicate user accounts were not created. At the same time, we used role-based permissions to give our employees access to all relevant customer records when needed.

This was an important step toward a unified support and project environment. In support, the historical source of a record is not what matters. What matters is that the right customer, the right contact, and the right ticket are brought together.

Company-Specific Project Structures – Collaboration Across Boundaries

BCS helped us achieve this balance between centralized collaboration and targeted permissions.

Ticketing System with Customer Access: Centralized Work, Targeted Control

The ticketing system is the most important part of our daily support work. We use it for customer requests, internal tickets, and shared maintenance tasks. It was particularly important to structure the project group hierarchy so that customer access works reliably.

Customers are assigned to the relevant projects. This allows them to view or create tickets exactly where it makes sense from a business perspective. At the same time, internal employees can collaborate across projects and companies when they work with the same customers or on the same technical topics.

One very specific issue concerned email communication from the ticketing system. Initially, BCS sent ticket notifications primarily from the same sender address. As a result, customers sometimes replied to an address they were not familiar with.

For example, if a customer request was assigned to T.S.P. from a business perspective but the notification was sent from an n-komm address, this could lead to questions. For customers, the sender address is an important point of reference. They expect the communication to match the relevant company or project context.

We deliberately keep our internal structure in BCS straightforward. We mainly represent teams as organizational units, with each team assigned a department head. Vacation management also follows this structure.

This generally works very well, but a corporate group that has grown over time inevitably presents special cases. Employees may be assigned to multiple organizations or teams. As a result, they do not automatically see one another, for example when assigning tickets. For our work, however, it is important that all relevant employees are available as contacts across company boundaries.

We addressed this by using assignments such as “department employee” and maintaining the corresponding groups and organizations. Importing groups from Active Directory is also useful because this information is then available as soon as a user is created.

Vacation approvals also showed that organizational reality and system logic do not always align perfectly. Vacation requests are approved through the “department head” assignment, which depends on the company hierarchy. In some cases, employees therefore need more than one direct department head or a department head assigned across organizational boundaries. The pragmatic solution is to communicate with one another, clarify responsibilities, and maintain the organizational logic carefully.

What We Learned: Flexibility Matters – and Projektron Supports the Implementation

The implementation and continued development of BCS within our corporate group was not purely a software project. It also involved organization, data quality, permission concepts, and the question of how to transfer historically evolved structures into a shared work environment.

Customer master data, contacts, project groups, ticket access, and sender addresses in particular demonstrated that BCS offers many options. With the right support, even more complex requirements can be implemented effectively.

From our perspective, one major advantage is that BCS enables these kinds of adaptations. The system provides a wide range of options, allowing us to use it in a way that fits our organization—with the flexibility required by a growing corporate group and centralized structures for day-to-day collaboration.

Assessment and Next Steps

Overall, we are very satisfied with BCS. Our users work with the system every day and rely on it for project work, support, time tracking, and absence management. In support in particular, BCS has become an established tool that creates transparency and noticeably improves collaboration.

Of course, the success of a ticketing system also depends on processes being followed consistently and information being documented properly. BCS provides the appropriate structure: tickets, responsibilities, history, and customer context can all be tracked centrally. This helps us in our daily work and ensures that support requests do not disappear into individual inboxes or personal filing systems.

We are especially pleased with the support provided by Projektron. Since replacing the former Notes integration and moving to Microsoft 365, the environment has been more stable and run more smoothly. Licensing and sales matters are also straightforward for us: whenever we need something, we receive fast and reliable assistance.

Looking ahead, we see several opportunities for further development. API web services are of particular interest because they could allow us to connect data more closely with Power BI and other systems. The Downloads workspace could also provide an alternative to our existing methods of making files available. BPMN workflows are another item on our list once we have the internal capacity to address these topics.

Our Conclusion

With BCS, we have created a shared platform that centrally supports our project work, time tracking, absences, and, above all, our support operations.

It was particularly important for us to represent the structures that have evolved within the n-komm Group: three companies, different customer databases, several legacy systems, and at the same time shared work on IBM Power topics, customer projects, and maintenance tasks.

Today, employees from n-komm, T.S.P., and Wilsch IT can work in a single environment. Customer projects and tickets can be tracked centrally, access can be controlled selectively, and customers receive structured access to support.

For us, BCS is therefore much more than a project planning tool. It helps us organize collaboration within a growing IT services group in a practical way—with clear structures, traceable communication, and the flexibility required for our specific needs.