ifm

WHEN PROFESSIONALS CARE FOR PROFESSIONALS

From Europe to North and South America as well as from Africa to Australia: The family-managed ifm group of companies has subsidiaries and development as well as production locations in more than 70 countries. Just the right thing for NTS.

There is no alternative to the international industry leader for sensor technology ifm when it comes to groundbreaking automation and digitalization technology. Measuring, controlling, regulating and analyzing–more than 8,100 employees in 95 countries, amongst them approximately 1,780 sales employees and trade partners, take care of more than 160,000 purchasing customers globally. In comparison, you look at an IT department with a little bit more than a dozen employees that handles the entire IT in house infrastructure and network technology.

Sascha Piech describes why NTS stood out from the beginning when compared to other IT service providers: “We were very well aware that something had to change and when NTS introduced themselves and offered their services, we acknowledged it immediately that joining forces with NTS was the right decision. Initially, to start with,we jointly brought the environment onto the same patch level. We had more than 20 different types of devices all with different version levels and they all reacted in different ways. We as in-house IT, were almost incapacitated with all this. Thanks to a standardization as a comprehensive transition phase, we were, together with NTS, able to reduce everything to two or three devices, thus entering a supportable state.”

Being familiar INCREASES the EFFICIENCY

It is definitely not obvious that ifm as an international company did not decide for one of the large, global IT service provid ers, but for a “relatively small company like NTS that is still a little bit under the radar in this industry.”, illustrates Piech. “Therefore, we added an exit clause into our first contract, which turned out to be irrelevant after a short while.” The decisive arguments for the lasting cooperation were the technical professionalism, the personal relationship, the trustworthiness andof course the product range of Cisco that is available and usable around the globe. The future at ifm promises many challenges for NTS: Especially the topic of security which is a key focus and any troubleshooting at ifm’s customer nowgoes directly to NTS.

All of this would have been impossible, were it not for an especially intense or ganization, which stood behind it: “Every two weeks there are technical meetings about general topics, a project meeting is held monthly and there are the ticket in terfaces on top of it. But there is not a single day where we don’t talk to somebody from NTS. However, then it is not about problemsolving, on the contrary–we talk about Managed Service topics or about approvals from my side.”