New business streams, new markets, one platform

By Flemming Rohde, COO, Automize

There are so many things I could write about regarding Automize and our journey as a start-up company with global represented customers. But I think the fact we employ 18 people might be an interesting stat to start with.

Located in the Danish seaport of Kolding, our small team works with companies of all sizes, transforming their processes, creating digital workflows, optimising and – you guessed it – automating.  

Our aspirations are high. We started out as an IT consultancy but by riding the wave of digital workflows we have seen our Managed Service Provider (MSP) offering grow fast. This shift has been powered by the ServiceNow platform, which is the foundation for the provision of IT operations and support to our customers.

A single data source for effective decision-making

Despite our growth, it’s fair to say that our house was not in order a couple of years ago. We were struggling with a poor overview of project planning and progress, a lack of digitised workflows and then the resulting delays in service delivery to customers.

Decision makers and managers need a full and up-to-date overview of current and upcoming projects, capacity and progress to be able to manage effectively, but this simply wasn’t happening. To achieve this, we had to move away from a multitude of systems that were powering our timesheets, team collaboration and sales tasks.

Currently, Automize is implementing project management internally. By standardising all data and project management onto the ServiceNow platform will enable us to keep track of all planned and unplanned work in one place. The newly created dashboard also clearly visualises and prioritises tasks, removing any uncertainties, confusion or time-consuming manual data gathering. We expect a marked improvement in both our productivity and service delivery timelines.

Digitising onboarding for a company of 18 people? Absolutely!

Overall, we have digitised more than 60 different IT processes so far with the help of the agile and intuitive Now Platform. It’s possible that we are the smallest company with a digitised workflow created specifically for our employee onboarding. Self-indulgent? We don’t think so.

It is true we do not welcome a new colleague as often as a large organisation may, but having an end-to-end workflow created for things like requesting new equipment, arranging a security pass or creating a new user, keeps us at the forefront of employee experiences. It is something the new generations of employees now expect in their workplace.

By transforming our internal IT experience, we are in a position, as an MSP, to pass the benefits of digital workflows onto our customers.  

Let’s take a process that has always been time-consuming, like the provisioning of servers. Our customers now complete the orders within 10 seconds via a self-service portal. I think this is what consumer-grade experiences in the workplace should be like and our customers’ feedback has been extremely positive.

Tapping into new markets

Growing our software development part of the business has been the major route to global expansion. In part, it has been encouraged by the demand from our existing customers and also by our aim to reach new customers and markets.

A recent successful example includes our new Service Portal widget to capture user feedback. The free app has been developed, certified and published on the ServiceNow Store in a matter of weeks and it’s currently being used by 150 ServiceNow customers around the globe, including universities and financial sector organisations.

We have several more applications, both free and paid, in the pipeline that we will be looking to get certified for the ServiceNow Store, which is proving to be a great channel to reach new customers.

Artificial Intelligence meets human knowledge

The Now Platform’s flexibility and evolving capabilities are key enablers of our growth, now and in the future. Specifically, we are looking at machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies as future drivers of consistent and high-quality services.

Let me conclude with going back to the people element though. I started with our team of 18 in a Danish seaside town. We are proud to be a ServiceNow Technology Partner given the size of the organisation. We also believe that modern workplace technology and experiences at work, including those powered by AI, will only be made possible with significant investments in human knowledge and buy-in.

At Automize, we are working on it.