IBM

IBM – Improved efficiency and flexibility at worldwide level

“Our goal was to improve efficiency and flexibility in ITSM for the customer at a worldwide level. At the same time costs had to be reduced by the use of a single tool. They recommended ServiceNow, an innovative ITSM SaaS solution.”

Piet Hoens Project Manager

IBM has been responsible for an efficient ITSM Organisation at one of its clients, an international and strongly decentralised pharmaceutical company in Switzerland with branches in 150 countries. When IBM embarked on this assignment, it didn’t take long to discover the bottlenecks that were standing in the way of good service provision. For example, the tool landscape was complex and fragmented, and different tools with overlapping functionality were in use.

In addition, the Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) was no longer adequate for the functionality requirements and many operational requests had to be processed manually. As a result, work on process improvements could not be carried out effectively. The problems were tackled energetically in collaboration with Fruition Partners using tooling from ServiceNow. A complex and far-reaching, but successful project, which Project Manager Piet Hoens and Lead of Global Service Management units, Ad van der Staak of IBM, look back on with satisfaction. “Just to give you an idea, our client used to work with a separate configuration tool, a change tool and even a change approval tool”, says Piet at the outset. “So we had to continually make detours when executing the work in order to record the implemented changes in other systems. That resulted in mismatches, old data and confusion. The situation was perfectly understandable, however. You have to remember that the growth of this client is mainly based on multiple acquisitions and that it is in fact a large collection of separate and partially autonomous organisations. Setting up a global service organisation in an environment like that is a huge challenge.”

Improving efficiency and flexibility

“Originally, only a local contract was involved”, Ad continues. “That was expanded to a global contract after a while. So while the assignment inherently stayed the same, the scope, and therefore complexity, increased enormously. We had to deal with more than 70 countries worldwide, all with their own tools and processes. Our goal was to improve efficiency and flexibility in ITSM for the client at a worldwide level. At the same time, costs had to be reduced by deploying a single tool with all the required functionality, i.e. Incident Management, Problem Management, Request Management and Configuration Management, including a good CMDB. Furthermore, we wanted to eliminate fragmentation and make the processes more transparent for the client by reducing the number of interfaces to other sources and tools. We took a major first step in the right direction with Fruition Partners.”

Off the shelf

Strictly regulated environment

Objectives achieved

“Although the administrative impact was significant, one could say that the technical implementation went perfectly. The tool is now used worldwide by 3500 users, to everybody’s entire satisfaction. The objectives have been achieved in cost terms as well, and that’s obvious. Things run much more smoothly. We have eliminated manual work and the flow of forms between submitting a request and execution. That is all fully automated now. For example, users can now submit change requests directly in ServiceNow. And when you have so many users, a faster process really delivers in terms of time gains. There is more cohesion, better compliance and higher quality in terms of data and the delivered services. In addition, Fruition Partners has developed a training course for IBM and clients’ employees. Participation in this training course was conditional to being allowed access to the new environment. Fruition Partners also gave a number of these training courses to IBM personnel, in Argentina among other locations. And just how satisfied the client is with the end result is perhaps best indicated by this quote, made by one of the program managers:  "With ServiceNow, creating an incident is now easier than ordering a book from Amazon’.”

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[Case study Fruition Partners]