Founded in 1977, the Hema Group is an internationally well-positioned medium-sized company with locations in Germany, Italy, Romania, China and the USA. The product range extends from protection systems for machines of all kinds, clamping and clamping systems to vision systems for machine tools, hinged windows and LED lighting systems. We had the interview with Nicklas Hegeler.
There was a generational change in the family business and the young company heirs had set themselves the goal of centralizing and renewing IT. Previously, IT was seen primarily as a cost factor and attempts were made to save money. Accordingly, the free version of Teamviewer was basically relied on exclusively.
Our interviewee was hired at the end of 2022 to renew and modernize IT. He is responsible for the management of the IT infrastructure. In addition to him, there are 3 other employees in first-level IT support. At the beginning of his tenure, there was no centralized IT management at all across all locations. At the company headquarters, there was a WSUS and a VPN.
“Without monitoring and a good overview, you can’t work properly, especially if you look after offices all over the world. I had no idea what was going on with the devices in Romania or Italy, whether they were online or up to date!”
Centralizing IT management across all international locations
The first project was the migration to the cloud. Then, after Nickla’s start, NinjaOne was quickly purchased and he was able to roll out Office 365 and uninstall the old Office versions centrally and conveniently. Nicklas was also able to implement important measures in the area of IT security immediately and without any problems.
First of all, all devices could be scanned for pending patches and there were quite a few that were not up to date because end users like to refuse updates. They have also rolled out Microsoft Labs with NinjaOne . Previously, he had first assigned new and secure passwords to all local admins via script, then automatically deleted them and managed everything via Labs.
Remote Support has also improved a lot since the introduction of NinjaOne. The directly integrated remote access, the CMD, the file manager, the task manager and the remote registry are an enormous support here.
“Before NinjaOne, we always had to connect to the devices via VPN. If the VPN connection is lost, everything is always smeared. That was a big loss of time. Or at support, people simply sent us an email with their Teamviewer dial-in. Today, we use NinjaOne RMM, and the ticketing and time-to-resolution has been reduced by 50%. Proactive management has also reduced ticket volumes by 20%.”
