Diversity is Votorantim’s secret to success
The Votorantim Group is one of Brazil’s businesses with global interests in multiple industries from building materials, manufacturing, agriculture, mining and smelting to renewable energies, banking, financial services and real estate.
Founded in Sao Paolo in 1918, today Votorantim is one of the largest industrial groups in Latin America, employing more than 40,000 people in 20 countries worldwide.
Standardisation saves time and reduces cost
Given the Group’s size and complexity, operating industrial processes on a huge scale, the company is always looking for new technology solutions to support its people in the workplace to be more efficient and productive, and to minimise their impacts on the environment.
Replacing slow, repetitive, manual tasks with automation, to save time and enable employees to focus on more valuable work, is a key component of the Group’s strategy. To assist on its journey, Votorantim partnered with ServiceNow, starting with IT Service Management (ITSM).
Before moving to ServiceNow, Votorantim used multiple tools to provide employees with IT services and support. “Our service providers’ tools controlled all tickets,” says Cleber Bueno, Systems Consultant and ServiceNow Administrator at the Votorantim Group.
“We have more than one service provider, so we had several tools, and depending on where you needed IT services or support, you had to raise a ticket on different platforms. This decentralised our service business. The idea with ServiceNow was to centralise and simplify everything on one platform.”
With ServiceNow ITSM, the company was able to reduce complexity and inefficiency in its organisation. Using just one solution greatly reduced the time employees were spending searching for IT support and services, as well as improving the speed and quality of those services. At the same time, streamlining processes for IT service teams saved time for them too, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks and resolve more significant IT issues.
“ITSM centralised all processes to manage incidents, requests and changes,” says Cleber. “This has been a big challenge, and ServiceNow was the right choice because it could meet all our needs. Now, we have everything working in one place, with an overview of all processes.”
Votorantim wished to speed up the achievement of its vision of working in a more connected and unified way, unlocking significant cost savings and efficiencies at the same time. After discussing its needs with ServiceNow, the company decided to add ServiceNow Impact to its portfolio of solutions.
Accelerating impact and unlocking value
Built on the Now Platform, ServiceNow Impact combines predictive software with human ingenuity to help customers adopt ServiceNow solutions quickly, optimise platform health and realise value faster.
For Votorantim, one of the most valuable components of ServiceNow Impact is its range of Impact Accelerators, fixed-scope offerings that focus on specific outcomes such as upgrade readiness and user adoption, and include expert guidance, insights and recommendations.
“We implemented an annual calendar of ServiceNow Impact Accelerators,” explains Cleber. “By aligning our annual planning with the opportunities offered by the program, this helps us organise our activities and plan our actions more strategically.”
One impactful accelerator for Votorantim has been “Jumpstart Your Upgrade”. It used to hire an external partner to perform its yearly instance upgrade, incurring costs and contributing to decentralisation. Thanks to the expert coaching sessions provided by ServiceNow Impact, Votorantim now executes its own upgrades quickly and efficiently, while also reducing costs. As a result, it plans to double the frequency of its upgrades to two every year.
The company also used the “TuneUp Your CMDB” accelerator to understand the current condition and status of its CMDB and to receive best practice recommendations and planning advice to optimise its health and value.
Finally, the Health Assessment accelerator provided Votorantim with a technical analysis of its ServiceNow instance health, guidance to interpret the findings and recommendations on how to improve instance health. “It doesn’t just provide a complete picture of our environment and our score,” says Cleber. “It also compares it with our peers and identifies exactly where we should act, what we should do, and what issues we should work on. We have already managed to improve our score.
“With ServiceNow Impact’s Accelerators, we were also able to strengthen our internal support team, no longer depending on an external partner. This resulted in a significant improvement in productivity, with a 50% increase in the efficiency of the dedicated team, keeping operational costs stable.
“And through the benefits of Now Learning, we are developing learning and training paths for our team, expanding their knowledge and skills, and ensuring that continuous growth is aligned with the organisation’s objectives.”
Solid foundations enable expansion across the Group
Cleber says that a key reason for the company’s increasingly successful use of the ServiceNow Platform is the trust and spirit of collaboration between Votorantim and ServiceNow. “ServiceNow has been by our side to support us, always helping us with our needs,” he comments.
“ServiceNow Impact has enabled the company to take full advantage of the platform and we rely on our close partnership to find new solutions, get answers to complex or simple questions, and learn new ways of working. The partnership has brought us a lot of success and has driven even more uses of the platform.”
The ServiceNow Platform and ServiceNow Impact have laid solid foundations and created a viable roadmap for Votorantim to achieve its vision for centralised, enterprise-wide IT services. The most reliable indication of the success of Cleber and his team is the growing interest in ServiceNow from business units throughout the Votorantim Group, such as finance, accounting and HR. All want to benefit from a similar approach to automation, digital transformation and the unification of process tools.
“ServiceNow is the excellent option,” summarises Cleber. “Our people have been looking to us because they understand that ServiceNow is the platform on which we can centralise our entire business operation.”