Problem Summary
Schaeffler Special Machinery department was overwhelmed with the amount of data in their Jira issues.
This included not only the logged hours, tasks and costs but also additional data being synced from other systems.
Solution using Epic Sum Up
The Summary Panel provides Schaeffler Special Machinery with a simple overview of key metrics in one place.
Progress bars visualise a real time status based on all the data, leading to increased team efficiency.
Searching through comments and attachments has become an effortless task, improving the team collaboration.
Problem In More Detail With Mario Giese, Jira Administrator at Schaeffler Special Machinery
You’re working for Schaeffler. What does Schaeffler do?
We’re Schaeffler Special Machinery. So we basically build machines and offer a related digital portfolio along with machine services. Previously only for Schaeffler but now we expanded to the external market as well.
Schaeffler as a motion technology company manufactures high-precision components and systems for drivetrain and chassis applications as well as rolling and plain bearing solutions for a large number of industrial applications. The Schaeffler Group generated sales of EUR 16.3 billion in 2023. With around 83,400 employees, Schaeffler is one of the world’s largest family-owned companies and one of Germany’s most innovative companies. Here, in Special Machinery, are approx. 1400 people who are coming from all over the world.
What’s your job? What do you do?
My main job is getting our laser systems to work. We have lasers to directly mark parts with clear text and machine readable codes (e.g. Data-Matrix-Code).
In our team we started working agile and with that we learned about Jira as well.
Jira showed the capability to help us with our work, not only in my team but also for our complete Special Machinery in Erlangen.
Since my team and I began working with Jira I also became a Jira admin alongside my main job.
Our Schaeffler headquarter also has Jira with about 8000 users. Here, at Special Machinery, we decided that, as we plan to sell to the external market, we would require our own instance. We want to be in control of it, have our own apps, etc.
How did you discover Epic Sum Up?
That was more by chance actually. We just searched through apps and we noticed that your app has progress bars. And since we were looking for something where you can easily show the budget and worklogs we stumbled upon you guys.
After we used a test license to evaluate Epic Sum Up (and by the way it is great to have those test licenses to be able to test the app a bit longer than 30 days) we got in contact.
If you wanted to visualize the progress, how did you do it before Epic Sum Up? Was this a pain point?
So one pain point that constantly came up is that Jira is very detailed and provides an overwhelming amount of information in one view. If you want to display the number of logged work, tasks and costs you can easily get confused.
And our main focus was to help people gain clarity. We just wanted a simple view, like a progress bar where more details are available on request.
In conclusion we made it simpler and easier so that you’re not overwhelmed when opening an issue.
Solution using Epic Sum Up in more detail:
Your need was to get a simple visual of the progress that you can define yourself?
Yes. Later on the need to display costs and more came up and to have all relevant data available in the same system.. Your app’s Time Sheet was able to match our needs.
For example at Service topics the opportunity to have an overview of logged hours, compared to the predefined workpage is very interesting.
What are the most important features of Epic Sum Up for you and your team?
The simple visualizations like the progress bars and Time Sheets are quite helpful. Also when you showed us how to get an overview of all comments and attachments, it opened up even more possibilities.
For example: To find a specific comment somewhere, you can just open the comments overview and type in some keywords into the search field. It will show you the comment as well as the issue.
One of your key use cases is that the time is logged externally in SAP and now is visualized (in Jira) with a progress bar. Can you give us some background around that and insight into the benefits achieved?
That’s easily explained. We need to log the times we work on projects in SAP so that the costs are assigned automatically. Until now, there was only the common view available, that is provided by the SAP system. No user-centered cost or hourly overviews.
Bringing together the options from Jira, like comments and attachments, with all relevant data from SAP, we were able to create one system for all our colleagues to have the relevant information and tools for their daily work, increase our efficiency and as well the employees satisfaction.
The systems are now connected with a script which allows Jira to access some databases with synced data from the SAP system. And additionally with Epic Sum Up they are now displayed as a progress bar too. And that was when people said:
Finally we can see a real-time status, just like that, without having to match different data sources.
Jira Administrator at Schaeffler Special Machinery
How long did it take to set up Epic Sum Up?
That was trial and error for us. There was a bit of back and forth and then we got the hang of it. It wasn’t complicated.
The more complicated things were: Why don’t the colors change? Until you realize that this depends on the issue resolution, this took some time.
If you had to sum up your work with Epic Sum Up in one sentence, how would it go?
It shows us, in an easy, simple way, a complete overview, just how we need it
Jira Administrator at Schaeffler Special Machinery
What advice would you give to a fellow Jira admin about Epic Sum Up?
What advice should I give? Use it .You’re the one to go to for great overviews, easy and structured working. You have a feeling for what interests the customer, like the Time Sheet or the Detail View Editor which you can work with like in Excel.
Little Things Schaeffler Special Machinery Likes About Epic Sum Up
- Key metrics displayed in one place
- Visualizations of key metrics as progress bars
- Effortless search for comments and attachments
- Intuitive and easy to use UI
