IT built a front door. Now everyone wants in.
How three companies went from scattered helpdesks to a single portal that HR, finance, and legal want to use
It would seem obvious that an entire organization could run on the same software, but years of myopic focus within different departments have often left IT managing a hodgepodge of tools that don’t speak with each other. Employees have it the worst. Onboarding often involves being handed off from HR to facilities to IT, instead of using one unified portal.
At Fellowmind, a business consultancy, enterprise service management spread through word of mouth, not IT strategy: “The reason we keep seeing Freshservice expanding is because people tell each other in the canteen about the good experience they have,” says Gorm Priem, the company’s chief of staff who oversees cross-organizational functions.
Here’s how enterprise service management (ESM) became the norm at these three companies.
Extending service management beyond IT
For years, employees at Brazilian dairy giant Piracanjuba took their requests from department to department, separately. The existing ITSM platform worked for IT but was too costly and complex to extend to HR, finance, and facilities. Freshservice offered a lower-cost option, but to make sure the platform was a fit, Piracanjuba started with the logistics team, its most demanding function. “We wanted to put Freshservice to the test in our most challenging area, and it exceeded our expectations,” said former IT governance coordinator Wanessa Borba.
Five months later, 17 business units shared one portal, with requests routed automatically to the right team and role-based permissions protecting sensitive data. Within three months, 90% of employees were using it, logging more than 70,000 tickets.
Read more: Brazilian dairy producer overhauls ESM with ease
We keep seeing Freshservice expanding because people tell each other in the canteen about the good experience they have.
Gorm Priem
Chief of Staff, Fellowmind
Replacing 15 helpdesks with 1 portal
When a supermarket shelf sits empty, the cause could be anywhere: a late truck, a failed system, a request that never reached the right desk. “An IT glitch can lead to certain shelves being empty,” says Stijn Stabel, former CTO of Carrefour Belgium.
For a retailer that serves nearly 80% of Belgian households, the trouble was that a problem had 15 places to land. Helpdesks for IT, supply chain, logistics, franchisee support, HR, and more each handled their own corner, and none could see into the others.
Now 350 agents work from one Freshservice portal, and employees in warehouses and at headquarters submit requests and track them in the same place. Logistics, store support, and forecasting and replenishment run on the platform alongside IT. Change management has moved out of Google Sheets and email, and eight of the 15 helpdesks have already made the move.
Read more: At ‘warp speed,’ Carrefour Belgium’s 15 helpdesks come together
Giving legal, hr, and compliance a shared system
Fellowmind, a Northern European consultancy built from a series of mergers among Microsoft partners, inherited 18 separate service systems across five countries, and the pile-up reached well past IT. Legal, compliance, and HR each worked in their own silo, with no view into one another’s workloads or priorities. With compliance top of mind, European rules like NIS 2 and the AI Act made this setup a risk, not simply an inconvenience.
Once IT and the managed services business consolidated onto Freshservice, the other departments noticed. Security, legal, and compliance followed, with HR now in rollout. More than 1,000 agents handle roughly 175,000 tickets a year, and compliance data finally lives in one place. The canteen buzz was nice. A single source of truth is what makes a compliance officer a believer.
Read more: Fellowmind unifies sixteen companies on one service platform
