Transforming the experience for buyers and sellers

A transformative mission 
Government services should be easy to use, accessible, transparent, connected, adaptable, and user centric. With these objectives in mind, and in a rapidly changing ICT space, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has been driving the Australian government’s Digital Transformation Strategy to improve government services for users. 

A key responsibility of the DTA is supporting government ICT procurement, which involves billions of dollars of public money each year. Inefficient, manual ICT procurement processes were a prime candidate for digital transformation.

Award-winning BuyICT, built on ServiceNow Customer Service Management, has brought government ICT procurement into the digital age and revolutionized the entire process.

Moving ICT procurement workflows onto ServiceNow has delivered multiple positive outcomes. A seamless digital process means productivity and efficiency have improved, while also enhancing transparency and compliance with records management and audit regulations. Small to medium enterprise (SME) participation has grown, innovation has been boosted, and the customer support team can now deliver faster support to users. It has also encouraged cross-government collaboration and the reuse of digital assets. 

“The government procurement space is complex. ServiceNow helps us build a platform that is simple, fair, and fast to manage buying and selling, and also comply with rules and legislation,” says Anthony Conway, Product Manager and Director, Digital Sourcing Platforms at the Digital Transformation Agency.

A seamless experience for ICT buyers and sellers
Historically, government digital procurement has been a manual process, with panel requests for quotes published via email. Quotes were then submitted via email, and in some cases physically to locked tender boxes. Contracts often required handwritten signatures, and physical records had to be stored on site for seven years. 

These manual processes and a cumbersome, time-consuming email administration process meant response times were slow. Necessary data to enable informed decisions was often lacking, and there was a constant risk that sellers’ questions or buyers’ responses could be missed.

Now, using ServiceNow Customer Service Management and custom workflows, buyers and sellers can manage requests and quotes directly through BuyICT. Sellers can also update their profiles through the portal to ensure that buyers always have accurate information about their company.

A contract workflow built into the platform enables users to fine-tune details such as individual terms and conditions before exporting contracts as PDF files for signature. Newly developed dashboards enable both sellers and buyers to manage requests, quotes, and contracts, while catalogs allow buyers to select the right sellers for their specific needs.

A whole-of-government service
After deploying ServiceNow Customer Service Management, the DTA is already transforming the speed and standardization of the procurement process. In just one year, the DTA facilitated 2,100 Hardware Marketplace, 801 Software Marketplace, 132 Telecommunications Marketplace, and 98 Cloud Marketplace requests for quotes –an average of 12.5 requests for a quote per day through ServiceNow.

“Sellers can now submit quotes in minutes without guidance or instruction. We are seeing the same phenomenon with buyers, who are now receiving responses to complex quote requests within a day or two. That could have taken weeks in the past,” Anthony explains.

“No one else in the market offers a whole-of-government service that facilitates both back-of-house operations and user-focused procurement workflows. With ServiceNow Customer Service Management, we have been able to build a platform that delivers a consistent experience and makes it as simple and fast as possible for buyers and sellers.”

Clear and fast automation has made procurement simpler. BuyICT’s centralized procurement pathway consolidates government spending and minimizes inefficiencies. Transacting through BuyICT has become more and more attractive to buyers and sellers.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” Anthony adds. “We have facilitated 5,000 transactions in the last financial year alone. The dollar spend through these marketplaces is quite extraordinary. We have seen an 82% increase in contract value, from AUD700 million to almost AUD3.9 billion in 2021. Before ServiceNow, these volumes would have been quite challenging to manage.”

Automating compliance
With compliance a major part of government sourcing and procurement, the DTA decided to adopt ServiceNow Customer Service Management to make it easier for both buyers and sellers to transact in the marketplace. Buyers and sellers now have step-by-step workflows to ensure that all boxes are properly ticked, and all relevant processes and regulations followed.

“With the automated workflows, government buyers, including new hires who are less experienced in procurement, can literally just follow the automated process and fulfill compliance and accountability guidelines,” says Anthony.

With the increase of access to suppliers and ICT services in the market, ServiceNow Customer Service Management enables government agencies access to the best deals on products and pricing through the safe and competitive BuyICT platform.

Collaboration, reuse, and customer service excellence 
The BuyICT platform is now used by over 100 government agencies and 3,500 sellers. And by using the out-of-the-box functionality of ServiceNow Customer Service Management, the DTA has created a catalog of digital products and services in BuyICT to give buyers visibility into what other agencies are doing or buying. Buyers can also reuse solutions and collaborate with other buyers on their innovative projects.

Another key advantage of ServiceNow is that as a cloud product with its own support and access to new features, it also enables new ways of using ServiceNow Agent Workspace to speed up resolution times and improve reporting.

In the past, emails could potentially sit in a group mailbox or be accidentally placed into the wrong folder, taking up to two weeks to be resolved. With ServiceNow Customer Service Management, the DTA now has visibility into the service inquiries or issues raised by buyers and sellers. This helps the customer service desk resolve level-one support issues in an average of just 40 minutes.

“Since the deployment of ServiceNow Customer Service Management, our customer service desk resolved 10,000 cases raised in 1.5 years, with 95% dealt with at level one support and only 5% escalated to level two,” Anthony explains.

Support for innovation and SMEs
As the ICT space changed rapidly, the DTA needed to shake up the way that procurement was being done in the Australian government.

One of the initiatives was to encourage competition and open its door to innovative solutions from start-ups and SMEs, who previously would not have had the opportunity to be part of government procurement processes. BuyICT provides government with access to new ICT services as they become available on the market. On some marketplaces, sellers can join and update the offerings that they sell to the government at any time.

BuyICT has enabled DTA to engage more sellers through platform efficiencies and automation. This has meant more SMEs have applied to sell through DTA marketplaces. 

In four years, the proportion of SME sellers in the Telecommunication Marketplace has risen roughly sevenfold from 7% to 52%, and by almost double in the Hardware Marketplace, from 36% to 67%. 

DTA also supports innovation in their own platform development. Throughout the deployment, the DTA embedded ServiceNow partners into their own team. These partners helped steer the project through the change and development stages and continue to provide insight into the new features of the ServiceNow platform. The team continually adapts the platform to keep up with the rapidly changing industry. 

“ServiceNow is flexible and scalable, and we can harness out-of-the-box features to build our own applications and bespoke workflows,” Anthony explains. “We don’t have to worry about the technicalities behind the scenes. I know ServiceNow is taking care of the application’s stabilization, performance, and security. We just need to focus on our core business, which is facilitating these critical transactions for buyers and sellers.”

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