Kuehne powers essential industries through streamlined service management

Behind many of the essentials of modern life—clean water, safe food, energy production, and manufacturing—stand the compounds produced by Kuehne Company. Operating around the clock with a century-long commitment to safety and reliability, Kuehne provides the chemical foundation that keeps industries moving and communities safe. Among the many applications of their products, one of the most vital is making safe drinking water possible for more than 36 million Americans—about 11% of the U.S. population.

But Kuehne's three-person IT team faced a crisis that threatened operational reliability. Service requests flooded in via emails, hallway conversations, and phone calls with no way to track, prioritize, or prove accountability. For a company where any delay or error could have significant public health implications, this had to change.

“Even out of the box, Freshservice worked great,” says Daniel Rodrigues, system administrator at Kuehne. “We just made small tweaks to make it more user-friendly for everyone. Implementation took only a few weeks—we were up and running in about a month.”

Within weeks of implementing Freshservice, powered by AWS, Kuehne achieved 90% portal adoption and expanded across HR, safety, accounting, and finance departments. Custom workflows now govern everything from facility access approvals to ERP modification requests, saving the company thousands of dollars in unnecessary development requests. New, real-time analytics empower executives to make data-driven decisions on competitive municipal bids and fleet optimization, while the lean IT team scales impact without adding headcount.

The company

For over a century, Kuehne Company has been a distinguished private chlor-alkali producer, upholding a 106-year legacy of excellence in producing and delivering the chemicals that make life possible.

The challenge 

For a company whose products are vital to public health and industrial continuity, operational efficiency isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. Yet Kuehne’s lean IT team faced mounting challenges as the business expanded. Service requests arrived through scattered emails, hallway conversations, and phone calls, creating bottlenecks and eroding visibility. In an environment where even minor delays could impact essential services, the need for a scalable, transparent IT solution became mission-critical.

Three IT professionals supported 200 employees across facilities in Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut, fielding service requests via email, phone calls, and hallway intercepts with no centralized tracking, no performance metrics, and no way to answer basic questions. When leadership asked "How many times did our security system fail this quarter?" or "What's our MSP really costing us?" the team had no answers.

"We lacked a lot of visibility, which caused delays or even duplicative work," recalls Rodrigues. "I would be working on something while another member of the team would be working on the same thing without us really realizing it."

The consequences extended beyond IT. Safety managers couldn't track which contractors visited facilities—critical for audits by the Coast Guard, TSA, and EPA. Finance had no oversight as employees directly requested expensive ERP modifications from their managed service provider, with development costs spiraling. HR processed onboarding paperwork manually, printing, signing, scanning, and filing everything in binders. "The data was everywhere," says Rodrigues. "There was no one single source of information."

When executives need competitive intelligence to win municipal bids and operations depend on fleet optimization data, email folders don't cut it.

The solution

Rodrigues knew what Kuehne needed: a platform the team could implement themselves, customize without developers, and scale without complexity. After evaluating ServiceNow and Ivanti, Freshworks was the obvious choice.

"The thing that stood out with Freshservice was that it was really simple, and it had a lot of flexibility," says Rodrigues. "We can custom tailor these things to specific departments or user groups without having to go talk to a developer." For a workforce spanning truck drivers to lab scientists to executives, that flexibility proved essential. Freshservice, powered by AWS, delivered the scalability needed for 24/7 operations while enabling Rodrigues to implement the entire system—largely by himself—in just one month.

“The thing that stood out with Freshservice was how simple and flexible it is,” says Rodrigues. “We can customize everything—from ticket fields to forms—without needing a developer. We have free rein, and that’s huge for us.”

The rollout followed a strategic playbook. First, email requests were automatically converted to tickets. Then came the service portal, backed by internal marketing campaigns that drove 90% adoption. "You log in, and if you have an issue, click on Report an Issue, and you fill it out almost like an email," Rodrigues describes. "Everyone's become used to that."

Then Kuehne got creative. The safety department digitized their facility access form, transforming a paper process into an automated workflow—visitors now trigger approvals that notify security, operations managers, and key personnel instantly. HR automated employee lifecycle workflows, eliminating binders full of signed paperwork. Finance implemented the game-changer: an ERP modification request system with multi-level approvals.

Before, employees would call their managed service provider directly, requesting changes that turned into surprise invoices. Now? Every modification request flows through Rodrigues for triage, then to the MSP for cost estimation, then to leadership for final approval. Development spending transformed from wild west to a governed process overnight.

Impact

The transformation happened fast. Portal adoption hit 90%. Employees stopped ambushing IT in hallways. "We're able to clearly categorize things," says Rodrigues. "If someone asks 'how many times has this happened in the last three months?' we can just go in and—boom—we have a category, subcategory, we can see all our tickets." As such, SLA adherence reached 98%, a 40% improvement over the previous six months.

Safety managers also gained instant audit compliance with searchable digital records. HR eliminated paper trails. Finance gained unprecedented visibility: 47% of ERP-related tickets now flow through their governed approval process, with every dollar justified before developers even start work, leading to a 68% drop in development costs.

And data-driven decision-making improved. When executives evaluate competitive bids, assess fleet optimization, or track operational costs, they now have the metrics to back every decision. Freshservice gave Kuehne's three-person IT team the foundation to support 100+ active users, with room to grow.

“The data we get from Freshservice gives us a backbone for every discussion with executives,” says Rodrigues. “Now, we can back up decisions with metrics, instead of opinions. We’re so happy with Freshservice we’re already planning to expand to Freshdesk.”