Building a platform for growth
The Bell Food Group is one of the leading processors of meat and convenience products in Europe and the market leader in Switzerland. This company, steeped in tradition, was established in 1869 when Samuel Bell opened his first butcher’s shop in the inner city of Basel. With the brands Bell, Eisberg, Hilcona, Hügli and other speciality brands, the Group meets diverse customer needs. More than 12,000 employees, in 15 countries, work hard every day to prepare top-quality products that give great pleasure to millions of consumers.
The company’s product portfolio has rapidly expanded in recent years, largely due to acquisitions, and, as a result, its IT landscape was disparate and dispersed.
With a growing international presence, Bell needed a simple, easy-to-use technology platform to provide consistent, high-quality IT service and operations management capabilities for its teams in its many food brands and business units, which include some of Europe’s best-known names.
Standardising IT processes
The group’s employees depend on reliable, instant access to fully functioning IT systems, tools, applications and data, to be as productive as possible and provide great services to internal and external customers and partners.
But the previous IT support system had been so highly customised that upgrading it would be complicated and costly.
Obsolete legacy technology and an outdated user interface made it difficult to deliver the IT services employees need. Creating reports and dashboards required the intervention of an administrator, and searching for previously resolved issues or requests was laborious.
With ServiceNow, Bell Food Group saw a versatile, practical platform it could expand, beginning with IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM).
“ServiceNow is intuitive to operate, it doesn’t require much training, so we don’t waste time getting new users up to speed”, says Anabelle Klusmann, Head of Enterprise Architecture.
The team set a target of eight months to complete implementation, galvanised by a looming license renewal for its previous solution and the pressing business goal of standardising IT processes.
Successful implementation was achieved by out-of-the-box configuration, and timely and transparent communication with everyone involved.
“We definitely put ourselves under pressure to deliver fast”, says Sven Friedli, CIO, “but it was important to have that foundation of IT efficiency that ServiceNow would bring”.
Defining a product rollout strategy
First Sven and his team needed to decide which processes should be migrated to ServiceNow ITSM from the existing tool. The team held workshops for each topic, involving—crucially—process owners and system administrators.
In the Request Management workshop, the team was able to create a workflow that streamlined 132 catalogue items down to 86 within just two hours, by identifying and merging similar items and workflows.
Every adaptation to the ServiceNow platform was documented and made available to all project stakeholders, reducing support time.
Taking an iterative approach to rollout, the team convenes a steering board every three months to update on new options and decide which capabilities the group wants to build, in the process devising a road map.
Creating their own innovation process, called ServiceNow Request, the team has made it possible to open incidents within ServiceNow from the SAP API, as their SAP ERP system delivered technical functionalities they wished to retain.
Additionally, they’ve created a bi-directional API whereby only SAP change management or SAP solution manager had the lead at any one time. Again, SAP solution manager contained technical features they did not want to lose.
Implementation of ITOM is ongoing, but Sven is confident of the vital role it will play: “We have thousands of Configuration Items (CIs) in place and our inventory is not yet in the best state”, he says. “With ITOM, we hope to improve data quality to keep the CI inventory up to date, and based on that, consolidate systems and ensure they’re updated to create a good foundation for the next level of digitalisation”.
Transparency drives efficiencies
Having standardised group-wide ITIL-processes, Anabelle and her team are receiving even more requests from the business to map their processes to ServiceNow.
Among them, the production team in Basel wanting their own dashboard, providing transparency for team members and giving the site manager full visibility of all requests and incidents.
“One of the most important benefits of ServiceNow is the transparency it offers”, observes Sven. “We know now what kind of incidents we have over the group, and where we have outages, we can focus on the source and define action points”.
As a result, the number of requests created has gone down by 14%, the average time to fulfil a request has been reduced by 9% and the average time to resolve an incident has dropped by 33%. The value of these improvements has been calculated at almost €200,000.
Teams are organising themselves by using visual task boards in the platform to-do lists, incidents and inquiries are contained in a single view so individuals and leaders can see immediately which are resolved, how far they’ve progressed or reassign them.
Sven adds: “With ServiceNow, we’re constantly improving. Business units are building up their own dashboards which are shareable within the group, and that’s fostering dialogue and collaboration: ‘How does this impact? Can we work together on that?’”
“It’s more rewarding too”, comments Christine Kerwin, Head of Application Management, “because before that, decision-making was happening without the same insight—now, there’s potential to do better”.
Digitising and optimising processes across multiple departments
Anabelle and her team created ServiceNow Request to give every end user with a fulfiller licence the option to request changes, which are reviewed to determine whether a solution is needed or exists already.
And with a need for transparency, harmonisation and control across the entire Bell Food Group, that’s where the focus of new ServiceNow capability now resides. “I have IT budgets in several different companies with different processes, but I don’t have an overview of them all”, explains Sven. “Now, with one tool, and one workflow, I will be able to manage all my investments across the group, not only for IT but for many other business departments”.
And where new investment approval previously involved signing paperwork, it’s completely automated. “Instead of waiting for five days on average, one click and it’s done!” he adds.
Ringing in the future for Bell Food Group
Leaving behind paper-based processes, having transparent workflows, centralised support and knowing who is responsible for what, are all proving transformative for this large and diverse company, as it continues its ServiceNow journey.
Sven describes ServiceNow as “a huge toolbox we don’t have to build”. Next on the production line is the overall implementation of ServiceNow Discovery, Service Mapping and Certificate Management to achieve even greater visibility across the infrastructure and avoid outages.
The Bell Food Group is excited about the future. “Thanks to ServiceNow, we’ve set a strong foundation in service management”, says Sven. “From here we can deliver even more value to other departments, especially in the field of operational technology (OT) where complexity is growing at pace”.