The starting point:
STARK Group is the largest provider of building materials, services and advice and the preferred local partner for professional builders in Northern Europe. For the past 10 years, STARK has grown substantially through various M&As, where the various business units each had their individual IT operating models.
This brought about a few challenges for STARK’s IT landscape: there were few common processes and no service reporting tool existed to manage the IT service delivery and support. The various IT-departments relied heavily on local vendors for outsourcing, and STARK had a limited shared overview on how suppliers performed.
In addition, internal and external resources were not aligned on processes and collaboration.
Mats Erik Berger
Director, NextGen Operations
KPMG in Denmark
The solution:
STARK’s goal was to back source processes and tools to take charge of their service delivery to the business. This required rethinking the sourcing strategy and investing in resources and capabilities to transform STARK’s IT from a ‘black-box’ delivered by multiple external service providers to a service organisation where governance, control and streamlined end-to-end processes are implemented across departments and countries, with STARK at the steering wheel.
STARK and KPMG worked together to implement a new operating model that included a Service Integration and Management (SIAM) set-up by building up the internal service integrator function. SIAM best practice provides governance, integration and coordination to ensure organisations get maximum value from their service providers.
In addition, the ServiceNow platform was also implemented to enable an end-to-end IT Service Management across all business units and towards suppliers.
KPMG also provided STARK IT with guidance for IT sourcing, enabling STARK IT to formulate the required governance, processes, roles, responsibilities and reporting in a more precise way, once sourcing is performed.
With our new setup, we now have efficient and aligned processes and roles across the entire STARK Group, as well as having greater control over our future. KPMG has made the difference by providing their expertise and implementing a new operating model and a platform for IT Service Management, which empower our employees to use their time on value-adding tasks, provide great service internally and reach our ambitions much faster.
The outcome:
Once the SIAM principles were applied and the ServiceNow platform operational, STARK benefited from a streamlined governance structure, better communication and reporting internally and externally, with all end-to-end common processes gathered in a single tool.
Effective, efficient and aligned processes and roles across the group, regarding Incident, Problem, Change, Knowledge and Service Requests enabled STARK to use their time on valuable tasks, delight the customers internally at STARK Group and get ahead much faster.
Transforming IT from being an insight “black box” to understanding what makes good or bad service, has dramatically changed the perception of STARK Group IT. This is exemplified by onboarding STARK UK to STARK’s new operating model in less than three months.
Today, STARK IT has the required roles, processes, structure, forums and tools to govern, manage and collaborate in an eco-system of internal and external IT service providers.
Key facts about STARK Group:
STARK Group is one of Northern Europe’s major distributors of building construction material.
- 1,150 shops and distribution centers in the Nordics, the UK, Germany and Austria.
- More than 20,000 employees
- About DKK 64 billion in proforma revenue
