Background
The company
The Installux Group is a B2B player in the market for aluminum profiles and accessories for building finishing. It operates in three main sectors: building and home improvement, commercial and service sector development, and industry.
The ISD team
Working alongside him are 14 employees organized into 4 Business Units (Service Center, IS Infrastructure and Security, Research and Project Management).
The major challenges facing the IT Department
- Deploy an ambitious digital transformation plan, including the introduction of new customer services
- Industrialize IT Department operating methods
- Sustain and further rationalize legacy infrastructure and application systems
The need
A solution that centralizes all aspects of IT management and supports changes in operating methods
Benefits
- Centralize IT management in a single platform: budgets, project portfolio, time tracking, staffing and capacity planning
- Structured, rapid access to relevant information
- Flexibility of the tool, making it easy to get to grips with and gradually extend its uses
- More effective management, with more reliable and agile decision-making
The interview
Interview conducted in February 2023
Aucun intervenant pour le moment
As CIO, you address many fundamental issues, but what are your day-to-day struggles, difficulties and irritants?
As in most IT Departments, there is a need to share a common vision, particularly of the project portfolio, with General Management and the Business Units. Sharing the same level of knowledge about the progress of current and future projects is key to strengthening the relationship.
To achieve this, you need reliable information: first and foremost for the IT Department, almost “selfishly”, so that it can be properly managed. But more broadly: secure data will enable us to work in a participative mode with the Business Units, for example, to co-construct the arbitration of projects.
In a dual context of growth and transformation, I also have to deal withchanges in operating methods. When an organization has several companies and a very rich application map, “keeping the house in order” can become cumbersome, and we need to review our practices and tools accordingly. One of my objectives is therefore to manage the IS with agility, and to ensure that this attitude is shared by the whole team. The sheer volume of projects entrusted to us and the acceleration in the pace of decision-making mean that we have to be both more reliable in our planning and more agile. This means enabling each team member to position himself in real time, while limiting his risk-taking: How far along is the project? What resources will be available? And this can only be done if the right information and indicators are constantly available. With “classic” IT department activity monitoring based on multiple Excel files, shared directories, Powerpoint, etc., it’s tedious.
Why Abraxio?
If you’re determined to change the way things are done, the implementation of a tool can prove highly structuring and facilitating in supporting the process. That’s why I chose Abraxio, because to my knowledge, there’s no equivalent on the market that covers so many functional areas and is so easy to use – budget, projects, suppliers, resources. Everyone in the IT department – project managers, department heads and staff – can rely on the same tool. Everyone wins by avoiding double entries, securing information and improving communication.
What exactly do you do with the platform?
I started using the solution in the course of 2021, first on my own to make it my own, and from 2022 onwards involving the rest of my team. I took the gamble of starting to use all the platform’s modules at the same time , and gradually building up maturity through successive iterations. Today, this gives me a centralized view of a very large part of the Information System’s management.
To give a few concrete examples:
This is the last point I’d like to make: the search for information is extremely efficient, and the tool makes it as easy to provide a global view as a detailed one. This is very useful when you need to fuel a discussion or justify a specific point, for example at a Management Committee or Executive Committee meeting.
- In terms of financial vision, Abraxio enables me to monitor my IT Department’s budget, and to manage the re-invoicing of the services we provide to our subsidiaries; in this respect, Abraxio is highly complementary to the Finance Department’s IS, and brings a great deal of value to analysis and management. I appreciate the efficiency of document management (administrative documents such as orders and invoices are linked and quickly accessible). But above all, in addition to making data more reliable (consumed, committed), Abraxio enables us to finely dispatch each cost, and to manage both expenses and annual charges.
- I’m also responsible for the overall management of my project portfolio: I use it mainly as a template to get a macro view of all the IT Department’s projects and activities: we use flash reports to provide a consistent level of reporting and harmonize communication.
- Teams enter their times, which not only enables us to justify re-invoicing to the various entities, but also to obtain charts to improve our ability to better estimate future expenses. This is done on the basis of information whose veracity is not questionable, and which is, moreover, accessible at all times.
- This is the last point I’d like to make: the search for information is extremely efficient, and the tool makes it as easy to provide a global view as a detailed one. This is very useful when you need to fuel a discussion or justify a specific point, for example at a Management Committee or Executive Committee meeting.
And tomorrow?
Without cutting back on quality, we have a major stake in meeting our delivery commitments. As a target, we therefore plan to use the staffing and capacity management functionalities to match our resources to our workload, and to fine-tune our management.
If you had to remember 3 benefits of Abraxio?
The first advantage is the structuring and efficiency it brings to reliable information retrieval and reporting. Right from the start, the tool helps to structure, and if you take care to start “cleanly”, the end result is really clear and efficient.
The second related benefit is that Abraxio has the merit of being highly structuring, while remaining simple and adaptable to organizational constraints. It’s anything but a “gas factory” application that’s too extensive and therefore too complex to deploy. Abraxio is flexible and adapts to the maturity of the organization, the reality of its needs, and its corporate culture.This flexibility, combined with the range of functionalities on offer, means that operating modes can be improved without forcing everyone to fit into a single logic.
Finally, I’d like to point out how easy it was to get to grips with the system: I was keen to start using the platform on my own, to get to grips with the tool independently, and this was not a problem. It was also very easy for the rest of the team to adopt the tool, thanks to its ergonomic design.
A final word in conclusion?
At Abraxio, you get the feeling that the team is very close to its customers, attentive and responsive, and provides as much visibility as possible on its roadmap. For a software publisher, this is a truly remarkable point of differentiation.
You too can manage your IT department easily and efficiently



