SoftwareOne case study

How SoftwareOne turbocharged IT support for BMTS

BMTS wanted to bring its average handle time as low as possible to assist users outside of our working hours. So it decided to leverage Microsoft’s Copilot to streamline its support workflows across three areas: general IT, SAP, and the Manufacturing Execution System (MES).

Challenges

Expansion led to a higher volume of IT support tickets
BMTS had different support infrastructures for general IT, SAP, and MES
Time-zone differences disrupted timely issue resolution
Support tickets were often incomplete or misrouted, forcing the IT support team in Serbia to request further information, leading to more delays
Needless escalation of non-critical issues frustrated overnight support staff.

Project Summary

SoftwareOne was selected to develop the Copilot solution
Ticketing solution standardized the support process for general IT support, SAP, and MES
Plans for three discrete bots were changed and consolidated into a single bot
Fast pace of Copilot updates forced SoftwareOne to think on its feet and adapt

Project Summary

Support for general IT, SAP, and MES stations on factory floors is provided by a single standardized bot
The bot only creates a support ticket if its knowledge base cannot provide a workable answerRoadmapping
Bot ensures that support tickets have the required details for an immediate resolution
Misrouting of tickets is avoided because AI identifies the nature of the issue
Bot transforms the experience for both users and support staff.

Client: BMTS Technology
Industry: Automotive
Services: Data & AI
Country: Germany

Copilot aims to cut response time and efficiently overcome time zone differences

BMTS Technology is a global Tier 1 supplier to the automotive industry, with more than 1,300 employees working in manufacturing plants and corporate centers in Europe, Mexico, and China. The company is growing fast, especially in China. In 2025, it opened a state-of-the-art factory in Taicang and inaugurated an office and research facility in Shanghai. In lockstep with this expansion, BMTS initiated a Copilot project to streamline its IT support processes.

“We needed to find a way to cut our response time and overcome the problem of time zones as much as possible,” says Boris Lukic, BMTS Service Desk Team Leader.

“The global IT service for BMTS is in Serbia, six hours behind Taicang, and eight hours ahead of our plant in northern Mexico. What local support we have is limited to hardware and standard IT tasks. Everything above typical level one troubleshooting has to be escalated to us in Serbia.

“Because of the time differences, it usually takes more than a full working day to resolve an issue,” Lukic says. “What makes things even harder is that the information we receive is often incomplete. Key details are missing, so to determine the exact nature of the problem, we have to go back and ask for more information. Such a request is likely to arrive outside of office hours in Taicang, and so we lose even more time.

“We wanted to combat that issue specifically. We want to bring our average handle time as low as possible to assist users outside of our working hours.”

BMTS decided to leverage Microsoft’s Copilot to streamline its support workflows across three areas: general IT, SAP, and the Manufacturing Execution System (MES).

“MES gives you real-time visibility and control of your production processes on the factory floor,” explains Lukic. “Any delay in the resolution of an MES support request can lead to stoppages, and that is clearly something we want to avoid at all costs.”

BMTS chose SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) to implement the Copilot project. Says Lukic: “SoftwareOne has been our long-time partner and an asset of the highest possible magnitude. Considering our longstanding and very professional history, the choice was clear and simple.”

At the time BMTS and SoftwareOne were preparing for the Copilot project, the annual Sinergija IT conference was taking place in Belgrade.” Lukic attended sessions where Microsoft and leading AI experts from SoftwareOne were urging the tech industry “to calm down”.

“For Microsoft, this seemed to be an exercise in managing our expectations,” Lukic says. “They told us: ‘Whatever you think GenAI can do, it cannot do. So try to keep thinking basic’. And that is what we did. Our starting point was to develop a chatbot that would help people out with the bare minimum and submit the proper ticket.”

The original idea was to roll out chatbots for each of the three support functions. “However, once we realized that Copilot could handle them as a single bot with three separate personalities, as I like to call it, we decided to consolidate them into one, which is a lot better for our end users.”

When a user connects to the solution, it will pull in as many facts data as it can about his role, location, device, and other data related specifically to that log-on. “The bot will quickly ask the user to confirm these details and then move on to identifying the problem itself. This saves time and improves the user experience.”

For each use case, the bot will determine if it can provide the user with a satisfactory answer before issuing a ticket. Copilot will submit a ticket as a record of interaction, regardless of the resolution, as a way to keep records. The next step is to solicit all the information necessary to identify the issue and route the ticket to the right team.

AI fills gaps in the ticketing system

“In this way, AI is filling the gaps that we are seeing in our current ticketing system,” says Lukic. “The bot eliminates the step or steps where we have to contact users in China or Mexico to ask for additional details. Remember, each step delays the resolution of the ticket by a working day. With our Copilot solution, a ticket cannot be created until the chatbot confirms that it has all the necessary information for the support team in Serbia to resolve the problem efficiently. For example, if the bot asks you to download a screenshot, the ticket won’t go out unless you’ve done that.”

Although general IT and SAP generate higher volumes of tickets, it is MES support that will see the most significant change. “MES is disconnected from anything else and is not integrated into how we currently create support tickets. At present, a lot of manual input is required, and that is very prone to error.

“A particular problem with MES is misrouting,” Lukic adds. “Our machines have a ‘brain’, a programmable logic processor (PLC) that automates many of our manufacturing processes. A malfunction in the PLC often gets misreported as a failure of the MES – this is the type of error that the Copilot solution will minimize.

“Another issue is that trivial problems are often misreported as critical because users think it’ll speed up support. We have people on call throughout the night to resolve critical issues, such as a complete production failure, but they get woken up at 2 AM because a printer isn’t functioning properly. Our bot will assign the correct status to the support tickets it issues so that these things can be avoided in the future.”

That future started in October 2025 as BMTS rolled out the solution to its plants in Mexico and China.

“We now know Copilot can do so much more,” Lukic continues. “It can be a central point for so many of our processes that are on other systems, such as asset management, VPN assignment, and approval workflows for new equipment. We could automate so many of the processes that we are doing manually right now and that are in three or four different systems – we can consolidate them. I see a lot of potential to make Copilot a one-stop shop for around 80 percent of our internal needs for IT support.

“But this is a promise for another day. We want to implement the streamlined ticketing system first and enjoy the benefits of that.”

Adapting quickly to Copilot changes

The implementation of the Copilot solution took three months but was unexpectedly challenging.

“The Copilot technology was changing so fast that it became problematic. Something that worked perfectly one day would suddenly produce errors the next. Here, SoftwareOne’s calm expertise was invaluable. The team would go back and work out what had changed, look at the documentation, track what the APIs were doing, and present us with a fix every time.

“SoftwareOne not only perfected the chatbot for BMTS, but they also took us with them on this AI journey, and we learned a lot about the new technology. Our AI awareness and hands-on competence grew as a result of this project.

“We are about to head for Sinergija 25, the big IT conference in Belgrade,” Lukic concludes. “Many things have changed since last year’s event, when Microsoft warned us not to get too excited. I suppose we are ignoring this advice because I am very excited about the Copilot solution we developed with SoftwareOne: it’ll solve a problem that has been disrupting our production and frustrating our support staff for years.

“I can’t wait to see our SoftwareOne friends at Sinergija and plan how we can work together to use AI to the full and automate more of our processes, create more value for BMTS, and improve the daily working lives of our colleagues.”

ABOUT BMTS

BMTS is a global Tier 1 supplier to the automotive industry, with more than 1,300 employees working in manufacturing plants and research centers in Europe, Mexico, and China. Sustainability is a key priority for BMTS; its clean turbocharger technology is estimated to have cut CO2 emissions by 80 million tons. The company is growing fast, especially in China. In 2025, it opened a state-of-the-art factory in Taicang and inaugurated a corporate office and research facility in Shanghai. In lockstep with this expansion, BMTS initiated a Copilot project to streamline its IT support processes.