Success with responsibility
Votorantim Cimentos is one of the world’s biggest producers of cement, concrete, mortar and aggregates for the construction industry.
Headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, the company operates in 11 countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, generating R$26.7 billion in annual revenues. The company is committed to decarbonising its production processes and is investing in innovative technologies to further reduce its carbon footprint over the next five years.
Its operations in Europe, Asia and North Africa are coordinated from its regional headquarters in Madrid and include major manufacturing facilities in Spain, Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia.
Rapid growth sparks IT innovation
The construction industry is eagerly adopting new technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and automation to improve productivity and operate more efficiently and sustainably. Votorantim Cimentos is a global leader in the research and development of innovative solutions to manage and reduce its environmental impacts.
The company applies the same principles in its adoption of innovative technologies to deliver IT services to its employees and business units, and to manage its IT estate.
When its regional operation, based in Madrid, wanted to streamline and standardise its IT ecosystem, it selected ServiceNow. Having grown rapidly in recent years, chiefly through strategic acquisitions, many legacy IT systems were in need of modernisation. The company also faced issues around its local contracts and licensing arrangements, and variations in the quality of IT services provided to teams in their home markets.
“Each country was operating in its own way”, explains José Antonio Palomero del Agua, Business Solutions and Architecture Regional Manager at Votorantim Cimentos Europa, Asia & Africa. “There were no common processes and a lot of duplication.
“Requests for support were being made in person, by email, telephone or instant messaging—we needed something more professional. We selected ServiceNow because it’s best in class, but also, it’s far more than just a ticketing tool—it’s a suite of solutions, some of which we needed now and some that we knew we would need in the future”.
The company moved forward with ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) and appointed the Madrid office of ServiceNow Global Elite Partner, Devoteam, to manage the deployment.
Gaining control with unified Service Operations strategy
“We went for ITSM and ITOM together to resolve two pain points”, explains José Antonio. “We needed to streamline and manage incoming demand for support, and to detect and capture the assets and devices within our IT infrastructure. Using ITSM and ITOM in combination delivers more value”.
The deployment of ITSM provided a single, centralised inventory of all requests for support, enabling responses to be prioritised with each request filtered to the team best placed to assist.
As a result of the automation within ITSM, the quality of each response was improved and resolution times reduced. Employees were able to review the progress of their request in the system, eliminating follow-up calls and emails. Trends and patterns within the thousands of requests could be identified, allowing for regional solutions to be put in place for the benefit of everyone.
Employees throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa now access IT support via a web portal and mobile app. Easy-to-use functionality and an extensive knowledge base and catalogue provides self-service at speed. Employees can now find answers and solutions to common questions instantly, such as resetting passwords.
A key enabler for better service availability was offering IT Service Management in multiple languages—Spanish, French, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic and English—to meet the needs of every employee, from executives in Madrid to production line workers in North Africa.
And for those preferring to use email or call a service desk for assistance—where internet connectivity is unreliable in a huge production facility—a ticket is automatically produced and integrated into ITSM, too.
Two-thirds of employees now self-serve
The depth and quality of support provided within ITSM has been so popular that 65% of employees are now using self-service, accessing an ever-expanding knowledge base.
“Almost 85% describe the service as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’, which is really amazing”, explains Javier Grande Marquez, Logistics and Operations Architect at Votorantim Cimentos Europa, Asia & Africa, who plays a role as ServiceNow Global Product Owner within the company. “People are really happy, which is a complete contrast to the situation before ServiceNow. We can manage the workload of our IT team now too, diverting tasks to those best placed to respond, making us much more efficient”.
Meanwhile, an approval workflow ensures that requests for equipment coming through ServiceNow ITSM are diverted to a manager for sign-off, meaning only purchases meeting pre-set criteria are processed, thus providing budgetary control and transparency.
Healthy CMDB promotes efficiency and security
Using the Discovery capabilities within ServiceNow ITOM, the company now has a similar level of visibility into the location, storage capacity and performance of every IT asset, device and configuration item. As a result, the company’s healthy Configuration Management Database (CMDB) highlights which individual items are creating issues requiring attention, enabling prompt action to be taken to fix it.
The Discovery process also provides business intelligence. The company’s software can now be updated to the latest versions, with up-to-date features and functionality, equipping its people with the tools they need to work more productively. Licensing information and user statistics discovered in ITOM have been passed to commercial teams to negotiate improved contracts with suppliers. And when new equipment is acquired and connected to its network, unique identification details and serial numbers are automatically captured by Discovery and updated in the CMDB, without any manual intervention.
“Thanks to Service Mapping, we now have a map of our assets and devices, how they are connected, and the interdependencies between them”, explains Javier. “If we have a problem with one server, we can see the potential consequences and then prioritise the necessary action, dealing with the most significant first”. In the future, Javier and José Antonio plan to add the company’s operational technology used in its manufacturing processes into the CMDB, to build a complete picture of both operational technology and IT assets.
The quality of the CMDB also puts Votorantim Cimentos Europa, Asia & Africa in a strong position to take on ServiceNow Business Continuity Management (BCM)—a feature of ServiceNow Governance, Risk and Compliance—to strengthen its security profile and ability to recover in the event of a breach.
“With a clean, healthy CMDB and full visibility, we can demonstrate to our colleagues the connections and interdependencies in our infrastructure and the potential implications of each event”, says José Antonio.
“With this detail, they can design the best, most effective, and efficient recovery plan”. In addition, the transparency provided by the CMDB has enabled a fast and efficient out-of-the-box deployment of BCM.
Maximising value
As the use of ServiceNow steadily increases across Europe, Asia and Africa, Javier and José Antonio are busy sharing personalised reports and dashboards with managers and executives to demonstrate the value and impact of the platform—for local teams and the business as a whole. The aim is to drive usage and maximise the value of the company’s investment.
The latest module on the roadmap was Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), which went live in December 2023. Providing a single platform for all IT projects, SPM connects to ITSM and Demand Management to ensure that all activity is aligned with business objectives, budgets and strategic priorities.
“ServiceNow is an excellent, well-thought-out platform that can be used out of the box”, concludes Javier. “And we really value the expertise and flexibility of our Devoteam colleagues, too; they are constantly helping us to get the best out of ServiceNow”.