Leica Geosystems Success Story

Leica Geosystems (www.leica-geosystems.com) is the leading global provider of measuring technologies. With close to 200 years of pioneering solutions to measure the world, Leica Geosystems products and services are trusted by professionals worldwide to help them capture, analyze, and present spatial information. Based in Heerbrugg, Switzerland, the company supports tens of thousands of customers with more than 3,500 employees in 28 countries.

When it has to be right

In the mid 1990’s Leica Geosystems started looking for an incident tracking solution to replace their manual process. When a company whose tagline is “When it has to be right”, looks for a software solution, you can bet they demand quality. They found that quality in Soffront CRM.

“As our company grew, our manual incident tracking process was no longer efficient enough,” said Marco Eugster, R&D manager, monitoring solutions for Leica Geosystems. “People from other departments and divisions within the company needed to be able to improve and test the software. We were looking for a software product to track the quantity of incidents, monitor the status of fixes, and forecast how long it would take to complete the fix.

Adaptable, customizable – Soffront goes global

A small team of software developers at Leica Geosystems started using Soffront software to try out the software and determine if it would meet their needs. The small team witnessed immediate improvements. Because of the success with the original developers, Soffront was purchased worldwide to be used by all of the company’s software developers.

“As our company has grown and our software has become more complex, Soffront CRM has grown with us. It is currently used by all our software development teams worldwide for developing, testing and improving our software,” said Eugster. “Soffront CRM is highly adaptive and improves the efficiency of our entire development team.”

A centralized repository improves efficiencies

Eugster explained that Soffront provides Leica Geosystems with a centralized repository for all incidents. “Using Soffront, we can closely monitor incident workflows and the time remaining to fix all open bugs. With this information, the project leader can then intervene and escalate problems, if needed. In the past, this type of information was not available to him. Being able to get an idea of how much time remains to fix all open bugs is a huge benefit to us.”

Soffront’s strong web based interface allows the entire development team to view the status of every incident, no matter where they are located. In additions, the software is well-known for its ease of use and extensive customization capabilities.

“Within our large organization, it is extremely important for us to customize forms and workflows to meet the needs of our many software teams worldwide,” continued Eugster, “When we implemented Soffront software, we didn’t encounter any resistance, because the software is highly adaptable. Soffront allows us to customize incident entry forms and workflows to meet the diverse needs of our global teams, such as changes in domains, cultures, and workflows.”

A stable product with excellent customer support

Over the years, the stability of the Soffront software has been excellent. “It is imperative that the software is 100% available for all users. A black out of the system during a hot project phase would be disastrous for our development teams and would stop the entire product development. With Soffront, we have never experienced a problem with reliability.” Eugster summarized, “We have been extremely satisfied with Soffront; their expertise and customer support are excellent.”

Eugster concluded that Soffront allows them to analyze and enhance their performance. “We can now track information that helps us improve the entire incident life cycle, resulting in improved efficiencies and a higher quality product.”