Bru Textiles creates beautiful interiors. OTRS enables great customer experiences. Together, we have formed an extraordinary partnership.

As their volume of requests increased, the Bru Textiles team in Asia realized that they had to implement a service desk solution. They needed something flexible and less stringently locked into existing processes. They wanted to work with a tool based on ITIL processes and knew that they would need to customize the new system in-house in order to meet the needs of their local customers.

Bru Textiles already had an existing service desk system which was being used by the headquarters (HQ) in Belgium; however this was inadequate for the Asian market because it was built to support HQ’s own processes.

Upon discussing with HQ, it turned out that every single change the team in Asia needed to make to the existing system required expensive consulting assistance. This was when they began to seek an alternative.

OTRS had been recommended by peers, so Bru Textiles’ team in Asia set out to evaluate the software for its functionality. OTRS Group was selected as a preferred vendor because their solution met Bru Textiles' requirements in terms of process management, ITIL support and service desk tools, as well as offered them the necessary flexibility.

According to Malcolm Berger, Digital Innovation Director, Asia Pacific, Bru Group N.V., "Once we implemented OTRS, we quickly saw improvements in our customer service. We support about 100 offices locally and another 400 regionally. Before implementing the OTRS service desk, it was very hard to prioritize the requests and adequately manage incidents. By implementing OTRS, we were very quickly able to monitor what was coming in and then spread out the workload adequately which really led to consistent service and pleased our customers."

Today, many of the internal Bru Textiles teams, such as Purchasing and Engineering, also use OTRS. It has simply become part of how Bru Textiles teams work.

An example of how the OTRS system has been deployed to other departments is visible on Bru Textiles Asia’s factory floor. At any given time, the Bru Textiles factory maintenance team manages several queues. The team also spends a significant amount of time on the ground fixing equipment. OTRS’s mobile functionality enables this team to move about the factory while handling requests in a timely manner – making it a very valuable feature.

Mr. Berger added that "We hardly even think about the system anymore because it's so easy to use: Everyone just fell right into it and embraced it as part of how we do things."

As they evaluated solutions based on their required features, the Bru Textiles Asia team was intrigued by the open source platform model. There was an appeal to using an open source product because Bru Textiles knew they could customize the tool to fit their unique needs. Having said that, Bru Textiles weighed the downside of open source products: There is always a risk that the product will phase out as the open source community shrinks.

With OTRS, this concern was alleviated because there's a team of dedicated professional developers who are constantly upgrading the software and improving it to stay abreast of changing business environments while meeting the latest industry standards.

Of course, a significant component of Bru Textiles requirements was having the ability to modify the system on their own as-needed. Mr. Berger continued that "The consultant who worked with us is a legend. He was so easy-going and a great teacher. He offered an initial workshop onsite. Following that, he helped us support the individual needs of our remote offices by working off-hours to help our senior developer learn how to configure and develop queues and rules unique to each location." Today, Bru Textiles operates its OTRS system independently.