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"Without OTRS, we wouldn't be able to work anymore. The added value is enormous."

Martin Widera – Case Officer, Department 14 | IT Applications

Talk to Our Experts

LaSuB Sachsen

Agents: 7

Tickets/Month:

1.100

Web

LaSuB Sachsen

SolutionIT Service Management

Support that's two-thirds faster – for 32,000 teachers

Why OTRS?

The Saxony State Office for Schools and Education (LaSuB) has specific requirements in order to provide the necessary IT support to the school staff under its care. As the responsible authority for all teachers and other school employees in Saxony, it needs a comprehensive complex portal (the Saxon School Portal).

Martin Widera, a case officer in the IT Applications Department, recommended implementing an advanced ticketing system to provide significant added value from IT support. While this may seem obvious given the number of employees – the State Office serves as the point of contact for 32,000 teachers at 1,565 schools – no such system was available at the time. “It was high time to change that,” says Martin Widera when asked about the earlier situation.

At the beginning of his time at LaSuB, he was tasked with implementing a ticket system. “We conducted surveys, gathered opinions, and asked other departments and service providers about their experiences and recommendations,” Widera recalls. The answer was always the same: “The overwhelming majority recommended OTRS.”

Based on this feedback, the first workshop with OTRS was scheduled soon after – and the team was impressed. What stood out most was how quickly and easily support requests could be handled: users can conveniently access the external interface via the OTRS API and request help immediately with the push of a button.

A key factor in the successful implementation was the productive collaboration with the consulting and Business Relationship Management (BRM) teams. This resulted in a customized, scalable, automated solution including data format conversion – a solution that the State Office was able to test successfully and roll out on time.

Impact of OTRS

Two-thirds time savings in support
Fast and clear request management
Efficiency: high output with a small team
Optimized team management
Immediate issue resolution with bulk actions

Features Used

Knowledge base
API (interface)
External user interface

Requirements

Fast support
Dynamic updates
Structured, user-friendly portal
Highly organized request management

The Challenge

Given the enormous number of teachers needing support, request management had become overly complicated, unclear, and inefficient.

“Each staff member had a personal inbox, plus there was a shared mailbox,” explains Martin Widera. “This resulted in a significant extra workload for the team and led to duplicate handling of requests.”

There was also a need for a central, comprehensive knowledge base to serve as the first point of contact for support cases, filled with guides, descriptions, and knowledge base articles. If a user got stuck in the system, it sometimes took too long to guide them to the right solution. “We had to stop manually writing emails with repetitive content,” says Widera.

Attachments and links also proved problematic – they would become outdated over time and couldn’t always be kept current. All of this is now avoided thanks to a central knowledge base and an external interface that enables structured, clear, and standardized support.

An added complication was the issue of school transfers: teachers assigned to School A might later work part-time at School B or C. A major challenge was to reflect the dynamic relationships between teachers and schools in OTRS – to separate from fixed assignments.

Since many reassignments occur each year, LaSuB couldn’t handle this manually. Without the ability to automate these changes in OTRS, the administrative burden would have been immense.

The Solution

According to Martin Widera, OTRS has delivered significant time savings to the State Office. It’s a night-and-day difference compared to before they had a ticketing system.

The first step was to create a web interface to synchronize necessary information and create tickets.

Now that request management is structured and centralized, it’s “very manageable,” says Widera. From an organizational standpoint, it’s a huge advantage that tickets – along with notes – can be quickly and easily forwarded to the appropriate team members. “We get by with a small staff.”

If a user hits a roadblock, they can always rely on a low-threshold support button. “Because we also receive screenshots, description text, and the corresponding URL immediately, we can provide support very quickly.”

Team management has also seen many benefits – especially when it comes to coverage: “If someone is out sick or on vacation, it’s very easy to manage in OTRS.”

Widera is pleased that the school portal team has saved two-thirds of their time. Not only have internal processes improved, but overall support has too. “Fast responses to requests are very important to us.”

As an administrator, Martin Widera uses both the live system and the OTRS test environment to try out changes and new features before they are rolled out in the production environment.

Overall, he gives a very positive assessment of OTRS: “A new system always feels unfamiliar at first, especially if you're not used to a ticketing system. But now, no one on the team would want to do without it.” The system is very user-friendly, and staff can act quickly and easily. “We also feel well-supported by OTRS – for example, with feature requests, bug fixes, or status updates.”

LaSuB Sachsen

The Saxony State Office for Schools and Education is a subordinate authority of the Saxon State Ministry of Education (SMK). Around 1,000 employees work across six locations in Saxony to enable education and provide advice and support to school leadership and teachers. The State Office also serves as the employer for the approximately 32,000 teachers working at 1,565 public schools.