Leaving behind legacies to align with best practice

Major Swedish manufacturer of commercial vehicles, Scania CV AB, has a reputation for quality. Founded in Malmö in 1891 and now headquartered in Södertälje, it is a global enterprise, operational in over a hundred countries worldwide and with production facilities across three continents. To drive the shift to a sustainable transport system, Scania is committed to a digital transformation that will see the organisation remain at the forefront of a dynamic business landscape.

To realise its vision, Scania sought to align its IT service management with best practice. Prior to implementing ServiceNow, the company’s workforce was reliant on disparate legacy systems to handle elements of IT service delivery creating a fractured user experience and undermining business potential. Scania wanted to drive the organisation towards self-service and improve the end-user service experience with a fully digitalised journey.

“Our processes were not working—we had to be able to create a holistic experience for the user,” says Kenneth Jogell, Solution Architect for ServiceNow at Scania.

Creating cohesion in user experience

Prior to adopting ServiceNow, Scania employees had to visit four different IT systems to meet their needs: one to manage access, another to order services, a third to raise incidents and a fourth for asset management. The existing service portal was a homegrown solution that had become unmanageable and unfit for purpose.

Because of its complexity, new services would take a long time to deploy and configure, significantly delaying time to market. The argument for decommissioning legacy systems and creating a more coherent user experience was clear and made a strong business case for starting the journey towards an alternative, enhanced solution. “Many of the areas existed, but they existed in isolation—they didn’t talk to each other very effectively,” says Johannes Danielsson, Product Owner for ITSM at Scania.

Optimising service delivery through a one-stop shop

IT Service Management (ITSM) was implemented in 2019, utilising ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box capabilities to deliver the project on budget and in just six months. Though still in the user adoption phase of their ServiceNow journey, the IT team at Scania have successfully transferred most of the services that previously existed in its legacy portal and optimised them in the process.

IT service agents, as well as internal end users, have benefitted. Where previously an incident would be raised in one platform, a request in another platform and a supplier would respond via their own platform—now Scania has all end users and IT service agents in the same, single platform. “That was a really big win for us,” says Kenneth.

“ServiceNow is easy to use, it does its job well, and you can find competencies very easily—globally because it’s such a popular platform. Plus, it speeds up the service delivery—which business always likes! That’s one of the biggest contributing things we’ve seen,” says Sargon Suberkli, Global Platform Manager at Scania.

A big issue that had existed with the legacy platforms was the segregation of data and how it limited teammates needing to access data, gain insights and run reports. With ServiceNow, the Scania team is now better able to democratise access to data and facilitate those processes.

Placing hardware orders with its vendor via the old system involved file-based delivery—the time-consuming sharing of files back and forth. Now, having set up a workflow to streamline those deliveries, thereby sending the information instantly and directly, computer installation that once took up to four hours is now the work of mere minutes.

Previously, Scania might have installed around 20 computers a day—it now has the capacity to deliver up to more than a hundred. Whereas in the past the limitation around how many devices it could register per day was system based, now it’s simply down to the number of computers a lorry can physically transport. “That is another big win for us and for our suppliers—that we can share information with them automatically. They can send the information back and the system is processing the data directly. It has substantially decreased lead times,” says Kenneth.

Cost savings through enhanced visibility

For Scania, the subsequent progression to ITSM Pro has been an organic one, governed by the desire to deliver for end users a platform and user experience that is of comparable premium quality to the products for which the company is known.

As adoption of the platform increases across the business, another key consequence is the reversal of a previous offboarding issue that saw service subscriptions failing to be cancelled in conjunction with subscription holders leaving the company—an oversight that accrued significant cost.

“Just by getting the data structured and displayed in a cohesive way in the platform, we’re now saving SEK 1.6M ($150K) per month on services that are not being used by Scania.”

Further cost savings and efficiencies were made by creating a service in the portal that enabled staff working from home to order office furniture directly from the company’s supplier, giving insight into exactly which items each user has. “So, when the leasing period ran out, we knew exactly what to pick up from where. That was a big success for Scania,” recalls Sargon.

Breaking down silos and nurturing collaboration

As Global Platform Manager, Sargon Suberkli was instrumental in lobbying to combine IT Services and HR Services into one portal, while senior managers who were already seeing the benefits of ITSM were keen to see those benefits extended to HR. Scania took the decision therefore to expand the platform to HR Service Delivery, creating a portal powered by ServiceNow Employee Center, enabling multi-department service delivery and future onboarding journeys at the company.

“With ServiceNow, we have one platform where we can facilitate more of the work in a one-stop shop for everyone,” says Sargon. “We want to have the experience of going to a service store, do purchases there—whether it be IT or HR—get feedback and know what needs to be done in that portal. And we’re on our way there.”

HR Service Delivery contains a general HR enquiry function whereby staff can submit enquiries on a range of HR-related topics, such as requesting leave or managing expenses. Whereas previously staff would have to email an inbox—a different one for every market and in every country—now the entire process can be dealt with on the platform.

“By bringing HR into the portal we’ve gained collaboration between HR and IT—two previously siloed organisations; we’re sharing resources, we’re sharing development teams and we’re talking on a weekly basis rather than just occasionally. That’s been fantastic,” says Sargon. 

Nurturing global thinking and practice

Catharina Finnman, Global Product Owner for HRSD at Scania echoes this. And she sees not only the fostering of teamwork between once disparate departments but an organisation beginning to think and act like the global company it is. With HRSD in place in Sweden since September, more streamlined processes, knowledge sharing and collaboration are already in evidence, in contrast to what went before. ServiceNow’s standard dashboard, requiring no more than simple in-house maintenance, has brought quicker ticket closure times, better visibility and an altogether more open way of working. While Scania’s 27,000 employee Swedish-based workforce has effectively debuted the system, in time every country in which the company operates will reap the benefits.

By using Employee Document Management (EDM), Scania has vastly increased efficiency and security around HR record keeping. Before its adoption, the company relied on hard-copy personnel documentation, stored in basement files. Every time a new document was generated, a printout had to be transferred by hand to the basement and stored in a physical document folder—time consuming to say the least. With EDM, documents are stored and accessed at the press of a button—there is visibility, rapidity, security and no more tedious trips to the basement archives.

Looking ahead Catharina anticipates that Scania, still in the early days of its HRSD journey, will ultimately make extensive use of the solution. On- and offboarding staff, a process that currently lacks clarity and frustrates resources, is just one area that Scania looks forward to revolutionising through automation and integration with IT.

“By taking admin tasks out of managers hands and enabling new employees to get up and running much quicker we’ll save both time and money in the future,” says Catharina.

And she sums up Scania’s overall ServiceNow experience with certainty, “Not only does ServiceNow deliver excellent technical expertise via Expert Services, but they’re genuinely interested in our organisation and how the functionalities of the platform can best support us going forward. On all levels, I feel that we are a valued and important customer.”

Embracing the reality of a fully digital future

Looking ahead, Scania plans to leverage yet more of the platform’s power. The team is looking into better asset management of screens, TVs and phones, and aims to couple that with QR code scanning that will enable registration of assets, plus incident management for all assets—be it a faulty conference room TV or coffee machine that’s run out of coffee. They are also taking steps to utilise ITOM Visibility to build a central repository of all their continuous integrations and ITOM Health for predictive and proactive IT operations.

ServiceNow has given Scania much to think about. “Scania is perceived by its customers as delivering premium products, and it’s important for us to uphold a platform of equivalent premium experience for our internal end users. ServiceNow gives us that,” says Kenneth.

Departments across the company are realising the potential of the platform, including Finance. Where previously the lack of distinct process around how to publish a service or internal invoice would mean several conversations, Excel spreadsheets and intranet research, now staff are realising just what ServiceNow can deliver. The customer service teams are also looking to the ServiceNow platform to digitalise and automate business processes with CSM and custom applications. “What we’ve achieved so far has given the company a lot of insight into what we can ultimately do to create solutions on the platform that bring real value to the business,” says Sargon.

“It’s a very exciting future that we’re moving towards with ServiceNow, and not only within IT and HR; I’m getting contacted by different parts of the company, from purchasing to commercial operations, who want to use the platform to build their services. Colleagues say to me, ‘but can we do this?’. And the answer is: yes, we can.”