ServiceNow® Platform to Standardize IT Service Management for all Departments across 60+ Countries

Customer

The end Customer is one of the world’s leaders in confectionery manufacturing that employs 50,000+ people and sells products in more than 60 countries.

Challenge

Being a multinational company, the end Customer had regional IT service management teams using local ITSM systems based on BMC Remedy. This caused inconvenience when planning, managing and coordinating the settlement of IT service issues. Therefore, the end Customer decided to migrate to ServiceNow and was looking for a partner with a long experience in ServiceNow implementation to customize and configure the system. One of the key requirements was to put the system in accordance with the end Customer’s business workflows so as to introduce ITIL processes of service transition and service operation, and ensure IT service consistency among regional departments.

Solution

Applying a deep understanding of ServiceNow and ITIL practices, ScienceSoft’s ITSM experts delivered a solution that supported the following 5 processes:

• Incident Management
• Request Fulfillment
• Change Management
• Configuration Management
• Knowledge Management

Initially, ScienceSoft’s team configured the Workflow module to translate the end Customer’s process diagrams into the language of ServiceNow, as well as determine workflow functionality by using workflow activities. This way, multi-step processes regarding change management, incident management and request fulfillment were automated by bringing together employees and involved configuration items in a single manageable area. For instance, with change management, the consultants defined the entire life cycle of a change from its initiation through approval to closing.

ScienceSoft’s experts also implemented the following additional features to make the software smoothly complement the end Customer’s business processes.

The Change Management process

Our ITSM specialists tailored the procedure of change evaluation so as to make it more convenient and familiar for the end Customer. The out-of-the-box feature for Risk and Impact Assessment provides user questionnaires to capture the information about possible risks caused by changes. Normally, users are redirected from a change resolving page to complete a risk assessment form, yet this may lead to data losses or changes. To gain more control over the data entered in risk assessment forms, our team implemented a pop-up window for questionnaires and removed redirection.

To reinforce tracking of configuration items (CI) that can be affected by a particular change, ScienceSoft’s ITSM developers extended the solution’s standard functionality for observing impacted items in the IT infrastructure. As a result, trackable CI classes include not only business services, but also servers, applications and DB instances.

The Knowledge Management process

ScienceSoft’s team brought to life knowledge management versioning to put Knowledge Management processes in line with the end Customer’s routines. This feature enables editing of a published article even by reactivating any of its previous versions displayed in the history. The reactivated version is shown in the history as a new one, marked with version as of Date X. This way, the end Customer doesn’t have to unpublish an article, search for its previous versions in the retired article directory and then publish a new one with the needed changes incorporated; instead, it now takes only one click.

The Email Notifications module

As a multinational company, the end Customer wanted their ITSM system to serve employees speaking 7 languages. The company decided to use English as the main language of the software. Yet, 70 notifications were to be translated to make tracking of incidents and requests more convenient for users lacking in English proficiency. Generally, this would mean creating 70 notifications popping up in the same circumstances but for the user language parameter. Instead, ScienceSoft came up with 10 notifications with a dynamic script and 70 notification templates. The script helps to identify user language preferences with a language template. This brought the following benefits:

• A transparent notification list with no repetitive items
• Easy introduction of new notification languages
• Secure editing of content in templates, no effect on the notification rules
• Secure editing of rules in the e-mail notification module, no impact on content

ScienceSoft’s ITSM team also used a dynamic script to implement the end Customer’s idea of translation into English following every notifying message. If compared to changing content in templates, this solution helps the end Customer to quickly and easily edit the English version in all notifications at a time, if required.

Results

The end Customer received a customized ITSM solution supporting the following processes: Incident Management, Request Fulfillment, Change Management, Knowledge Management, and Configuration Management. The project implementation helped the company to unify and standardize IT service management for all departments around 60+ countries over the world.

The combination of the ServiceNow out-of-the-box functionality and ScienceSoft’s respect to the specifics of the end Customer’s workflows resulted in 3 major benefits for the end Customer: a smooth settlement of IT service disruptions; an advanced control over the impact of changes on the IT environment; and automation of ITSM while preserving the end Customer’s workflows.

Technologies and Tools

ServiceNow, ITIL.