FWS Delivered Customized ITSM ServiceNow Solution to Improve Catalog Workflows for a US-based Client

The Client

The 2021 CIO 100 award winner is the client that approached Flatworld. They are a top construction company in the mainland US and also a member of the S&P index. They are a large conglomerate that held reins running across construction and construction material sectors. The client is an established name in water infra, transportation, and mineral exploration segments.

Client's Requirement

The client contacted Flatworld to have their ServiceNow functionalities improved to align with the current standards. They also wanted more processes moved under ServiceNow to consolidate control. The client wanted help in bringing their system alongside their customer's workflow so that more ITIL processes can be seamlessly introduced. Especially the ones centered on service operation and service transition.

Another key goal the client wanted to achieve through FWS was to ensure IT service consistency within collaborating departments.

Business Challenge

The challenges facing the client were as follows -

• For several years, the client relied upon ServiceNow till they realized most existing functionalities were dated and not up to the current standards. They needed to catch up a lot.
• The client had so few resources adept at ServiceNow to take a clever approach in the implementation of ServicePortal, ServiceCatalog, and CMDV. This led to the process becoming resource-intensive, time-consuming, and drudgery.
• The overall challenges led to the under-adoption of ServiceNow capabilities and needed complex integration issues resolves to harmonize with other connected systems.

Our Solution

To help the client move towards their goal, Flatworld bifurcated catalog items into three main categories -

• The employee equipment category

  Here, the client's employees were facilitated in reaching the customer's IT team for procedures concerning equipment, tablets, headphones, computer, and so on. To issue a robust solution to this category, FWS' implementation expert developed dependent catalog items. The goal was to allow raising equipment requests, filing equipment handover forms, ordering repair services for faulty equipment, and requesting performance tests.

• The access rights category

  This section focused on issuing access rights to authorized employees. What our experts did was create supporting catalog items relevant to this category. The implementation focused on intricacies such as access types for employees, tool varieties, information resources, as well as necessary equipment.

• The financial operation category

  This section affected how the services were requested from the financial department. On customer demand, we created a detailed catalog of items that included invoice annulment, invoice request, refund request, and purchase order.

To ensure that the service catalog items met the business process, we created a unique ServiceNow workflow for each category. Here's more on that -

While core processes were defined by workflows, its true purpose was to provide an abstract for an identical set of sequenced processes. Our starting point was automating approval requests from an authority to validate the purpose. This process was to ensure only valid employee requests were considered each time.

As it became apparent how complex the customer's organizational structure was, we were tasked to create versatile rules that were comprehensive and considered all possibilities. Especially, wherever employee requests had to be measured case-by-case.

Our implementation was designed as such to prompt ServiceNow to scan for criteria that rendered the request as valid before calling system functions that performed a specific task. All of these processes were completed by specialists within the specific construct of time.

The client also needed our ancillary services. They had our ServiceNow implementation team develop a feature to allow multi-level service requests to be ordered in a single request as part of the multilevel service request management.

With the client being dissatisfied with the already versatile ServiceNow functions, they ordered more additional functionalities with custom elements. What we developed for the client included features that displayed service orders in batches from numerous catalog items.

Here's a classic example of that - Workplace creation that postulated equipment booking, document preparation, user account creation, provision of access right, and many more were created with exceptional detail under multilevel service request. We designed features that allowed the automatic filing of suborders so they can be processed in compliance with existing workflows.

With our rich knowledge of the ServiceNow and ITIL practices, Flatworld's ITSM implementation teams delivered a cutting edge solution that supports the following 5 processes -

• Incident management

  We took prudent measures to restore normalcy in service operations while on the other hand, mitigating the impact on business operation and ensuring quality.

  We developed ServiceNow Incident management which currently underpins the process in the following ways -

  • Creates incident logs triggered by events or through email
  • Performs incident classification by measuring impact and priority
  • Maps incidences to resolution teams
  • Facilitates escalation for further investigation
  • Quickly resolves incidences and updates source where the incident was logged
  • Follow up on service levels and optimize outcome through reports

• Change Management

  Our solution gave the organization the ability to perceive the environment and adapt accordingly to avoid propagating risks to the IT infrastructure. For managing all end-to-end changes to the production environment, Change Management ultimately became the go-to process.

• Knowledge Management

  We developed a Knowledge Management function for ServiceNow to facilitate information sharing among employees, customers, and agents by letting them access knowledge bases with ease. This enabled tasks to be distributed and delegated further to team members.

• Request Fulfilment

  We developed within ServiceNow, a Request Fulfilment functionality that allows the client to cope with catalog requests raised through Service Catalog. The request being non-specific could be anything from requesting IT assets, and facility access to posing questions at HR.

• Configuration Management

  With the development of configuration management, we made the ServiceNow easier to use, a cloud-based centralized system for records to support the IT infrastructure and digital service data. Our team designed the configuration management database to allow dynamic virtualized cloud environment to make best use of it for real-time visibility.

The Result

The client was delivered a fully customized ITSM solution for supporting processes such as Request Fulfillment, Incident Management, Knowledge Management, Change Management, and also Configuration Management. The implementation of the project allows the client to uniformize the IT service management across all levels of IT.

With our team ushering changes into the client's ServiceNow catalog, it paved way for their staff to hail service requests for financial operations, equipment, and access rights. The requests raised by the customers were processed in line with their business process with efficient workflows than ever seen before. Our custom multi-level service request workflow didn't warrant the customer's employees to fully understand the intricacies of the categories within the list and particulars within the order. This is because the system was automated to associate order types within the workflow. This enabled submission and fulfillment of multilevel service orders, which the client recognized as the moment of success.

Outsource Technology Development to Flatworld Solutions

Creating true one-size-fits-all formula is impossible in the ever-changing world of IT. As dynamic as the thriving environment, and its relation to every company that has adopted some form of the technology stack to serve clients, make it a sophisticated environment that sees complex challenges year after year. At Flatworld Solutions, we have 20 years of experience behind us to know the pulse of the industry and evolving challenges within it. Knowing the full extent of challenges allows us to deploy newer and more specific technology solutions to target risks before they gain momentum to unleash disruptions to dependent operations. In the case of the client we served, they tackled dynamic challenges in their complex business ecosystem through ServceNow optimization. If you have similar challenges, do ping us and we'll move at war footing to resolve your challenges.

Contact us today and we'll design a unique solution for your technology needs without overshooting your budget.

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