Global coverage, local expertise

Every day, Wipro’s 250,000 experts help businesses around the world to accelerate digital transformation and build a more resilient, sustainable and inclusive future.

Headquartered in Bengaluru, India, Wipro teams generate annual revenues of more than $10 billion, delivering IT consulting and technology services in 66 countries.

To achieve its goal of driving growth and expansion in all its markets, predominantly through acquisitions, Wipro is constantly extending its use of digital technologies to support its people more effectively, and to unlock efficiencies and economies of scale.

Asset management in silos

At the heart of Wipro’s efforts is a long partnership with ServiceNow, which began with the adoption of ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) with Virtual Agent and IT Operations Management (ITOM) featuring Artificial Intelligence for Operations (AIOps), and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC).

The scalable, resilient and secure Now Platform’s digitised workflows have automated and optimised many of Wipro’s core service operations, ensuring service availability, delivering an improved employee experience and enabling dispersed teams to be more productive and customer focused.

To extend the synergy and impact of the platform, when Wipro wanted visibility and control of its huge estate of 600,000 individual IT assets, it decided to add ServiceNow IT Asset Management (ITAM) solutions to its growing portfolio of integrated ServiceNow solutions.

Historically, Wipro’s core IT assets like laptops, desktops and mobile devices were managed in silos using five disconnected legacy systems—three on Microsoft Azure and two on AWS. This required time-consuming, manual and often paper-based tasks. Asset-purchasing decisions were made locally and placed with local suppliers requiring local management, inevitably resulting in inconsistent quality standards and variable commercial terms.

As a result, there wasn’t an up-to-date, centralised view of the current inventory or lifecycle status of each asset, whether it was in use, stored in one of 200 stockrooms, undergoing maintenance, repair, tech refresh, preparation for re-use or at end-of-life.

Employee onboarding and offboarding processes were also difficult to coordinate, with delays in supplying new recruits with the equipment they needed. With an average of 6,000 people movements in the business every month, some assets were not returned to stock. Consequently, numerous opportunities were missed to achieve business and procurement efficiencies, performance and productivity improvements and cost savings.

“With ServiceNow ITSM and ITOM, our configuration management database (CMDB) and GRC are already in operation. By adding ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management (HAM) we could connect all the dots on the same platform,” explains Sudarshana Murthy, Director and Automation Head at Wipro. “By integrating systems and sharing data on one platform, we could take control of asset lifecycle management and unlock all the value from our investment in ServiceNow.”

Connecting the dots for better visibility

Despite the task’s size and complexity working across 66 countries, Hardware Asset Management was introduced in just three months, one of the fastest deployments in ServiceNow’s recent history. This was achieved thanks to the close collaboration between Wipro and ServiceNow technical teams, sponsorship of Wipro’s leadership team and the expertise of ServiceNow’s Customer Outcomes experts to streamline the design and implementation phases.

By consolidating five legacy asset management systems into Hardware Asset Management, Wipro now has a centralised platform to automate 50% of manual tasks, eliminate duplication of resources and effort and free up employees to focus on higher-value tasks. “By decommissioning five legacy asset management systems and automating 50% of previously manual tasks, we anticipate the consolidation on Hardware Asset Management is saving Wipro around $1 million each year,” says Sudarshana.

New assets are now automatically registered in Hardware Asset Management when they are first connected to the ServiceNow platform.

“Our executive leadership saw this as a strategic investment,” explains Sudarshana. “They could see its real significance for the next phase of Wipro’s development, especially with more acquisitions in the pipeline.”

Accurate forecasting enables smart decisions

With around 65,000 individual asset management activities each month, granular information on each hardware asset ensures that maintenance, updates and refreshes are executed on schedule. As a result, asset lifespans are extended, replacement costs delayed and returns on investment improved. Healthy assets updated on time are less likely to fail and are also more robust against cybersecurity attacks, enabling customer-facing teams to focus on projects rather than seeking support to resolve problems.

“Now, we can see the asset statuses at a global, country and city level, summarised in dashboards and reports created for different purposes and audiences,” says Sudarshana. “For example, we know that 74% of our asset inventory is in India, with the precise status of each item instantly available to see. If someone in the company needs equipment, we can see exactly what we have in stock and fulfil from there first.”

Access to detailed inventory is also enabling smarter use of Wipro’s $100 million hardware procurement budget by linking buying decisions to predicted demand based on analysis of trends and patterns. IT and HR managers are now collaborating to forecast upcoming onboarding requirements for the thousands of new people who join the company every month.

Armed with this information in advance, Wipro now has the bulk buying power to secure the best equipment at the best prices. By supplying all the equipment each new recruit needs on day one, they feel valued by the company and can be fully productive from the outset when joining their teams, undergoing training and delivering customer projects.

“In this way, Hardware Asset Management is contributing to overall business performance,” explains Sudarshana. “By automating onboarding processes, we believe that new recruits are now 90% more productive than before. Overall, we are seeing a 25% uplift in productivity thanks to ServiceNow.”

Connecting everyone on a single platform

Wipro is constantly exploring how it can unlock additional features, functionality and—most importantly—value from its use of ServiceNow. Its successful deployment of Hardware Asset Management is supporting its use of ServiceNow Software Asset Management to achieve visibility and control of its software and application landscape and associated licensing position.

With different hardware brands and asset types having different, often pre-installed software and security requirements, HAM data is also informing sound decision making, on software purchasing and licensing, for example. Soon, mobile asset scanning technologies will be used in stockrooms to provide an instant, live status of each piece of equipment.

All the initiatives that Sudarshana is driving now have generative AI actions integrated. “Generative AI is cutting across key activities such as IT operations, lifecycle management, cyber-risk governance and compliance measurement,” Sudarshana says. “For example, it automatically corrects conflicts in manual updates and details asset movement across stock room locations.

It also generates and summarises insightful and intelligent reports that help with decisions related to forecasting and capital investments. At senior management level, it can help to build quarterly financial reports and tracks capitalisation and depreciation.

Having achieved control and visibility of employee IT assets, Wipro also plans to bring its other physical infrastructure items such as servers, storage systems and networking devices into Hardware Asset Management to unlock similar benefits.

“ServiceNow has delivered an up-to-date, centralised IT asset inventory, with beautiful workflow orchestration and foolproof data, connecting end users, IT engineers and our leadership on a single platform. We can now manage more technology assets, with fewer people, more efficiently,” says Sudarshana.