After CK Enerji took over part of Turkey’s national electric power utility, it inherited outmoded IT technical support and asset management methods. New systems were needed to standardize and automate these essential services.

CK Enerji deployed the Multivendor Support Services platform to provide its employees with a single point of contact for IT support and unified IT asset management across the enterprise with the Maximo solution.

Since the start of the 21st century, demand for electricity has grown faster in Turkey than in any other developed country. To help meet the growing need for more power capacity, Turkey privatized its electric utility sector in 2013. CK Enerji emerged as the second-largest utility group in this newly liberalized energy marketplace and assumed the responsibility to serve over eight million customers in three of Turkey’s largest regions.

After inheriting infrastructure and employees from the former national power authority, CK Enerji faced formidable business challenges. Timeworn power grids, outdated processes and inefficient operations required modernization. Employees needed properly functioning desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones to help the new company operate in a more competitive business environment.

When CK Enerji’s IT management came onboard, they learned that technical support was provided by an internal team spread out across the organization. Employees expected personal service from co-located IT support personnel. In addition, IT provided its services informally, without documentation. Since service tickets were not issued, there was no way for IT management to get an enterprise-wide perspective on where service requests were coming from or how quickly they were resolved.

Further investigation revealed that in-house service technicians did not always have sufficient training or experience to resolve IT support issues. Given this situation, IT management could not set system-wide standards for technical support and quality assurance.

While reviewing CK Enerji’s inventory of IT assets, management discovered another shortcoming—there was no centralized IT asset management system. In addition, nobody knew which IT devices CK Enerji had inherited from the public utility company.

“We wanted to centralize IT support, but it was not easy to change the culture after the privatization,” says Serhan Özhan, Chief Information Officer of CK Enerji. “The main idea was to standardize and add visibility in the IT area and make this an example for many other business processes.”

After the first year of activating the Multivendor Support Services platform for IT maintenance, CK Enerji eliminated the overhead cost of a 15-person IT support organization. Additional cost savings of 10–15 percent per year are expected as the IBM solution yields further efficiencies through more standardization and better responsiveness.

Surveys indicated that CK Enerji employees were satisfied with their new IT support services and liked the convenience and reliability of a single point of contact. Employees didn’t miss waiting for technical support specialists who were out of the office. Managers also appreciated their new capability to monitor the service status for all IT assets across the CK Enerji enterprise.

As CK Enerji continues to add more computing equipment and mobile devices to its IT inventory, the Maximo EAM system is making it easier to oversee, evaluate and optimize the overall performance of the company’s technology tools and service level agreements (SLAs).

“Within 3–5 months, everything was almost stable from both an inventory management and IT support ticketing perspective,” says Özhan. “Above the management level, almost nothing has been escalated to a director or to me in 15 months. Now, I can focus more on the strategic side of the business.”

Founded in 2011, CK Enerji (link resides outside ibm.com) is Turkey’s second largest electric utility group. It comprises 5,000 employees, three distribution companies and three retailers selling over 38 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year. CK Enerji serves over 8 million customers representing 25 percent of the market, including the European shore of Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, where the company also has its headquarters. Major shareholders of CK Enerji include two of the country’s largest industrial conglomerates, Cengiz Holding and Kolin Construction.