Crisis Management
Boosting employee productivity on a conglomerate scale
At JG Summit Holdings, one of the biggest conglomerates in the Philippines, we drive business growth with a passionate mindset: “Dream big. Take bold, brave steps. Get it done.” Empowering employee productivity and efficiency has a big impact on the customer experience and, ultimately, on our business.
Life at a conglomerate can go one of two ways: Brands can exist under the same parent company and operate in silos, or they can flourish independently from a solid foundation of best practices and shared processes. To accomplish the latter, we decided to embark on a digital transformation journey.
Eliminating manual processes
In 2017, when my team was asked to transform how we deliver services to employees, IT services relied heavily on paper, which had to be couriered between offices. Cases also came in by email, chat, or phone with no visibility into who was working on what. With no accountability or quality checks, the IT team depended on tribal knowledge.
These problems also affected human resources, finance, legal, and shared services. To digitize business operations and drive efficiencies, we built a new solution on ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM).
Establishing a culture of accountability
First, we had to redesign IT and financial shared services to make them work for the whole enterprise. This involved training hundreds of people who handle incidents and defining structured processes to monitor performance and keep the team accountable.
The IT support team resisted the new process at first, fearing it would create a culture of blame. We explained that performance monitoring was part of the business growth strategy to identify customer experience improvement opportunities.
A dashboard monitored the performance of the support desk with clear color coding: red to indicate an issue and green to show a project is on track. A second dashboard displayed the status of requests and incidents across the conglomerate, combining data from the business intelligence solution and ServiceNow.
Improving efficiency
Instead of taking an ad hoc approach to change, we structured management processes for greater efficiency:
- A dashboard displays the status of a support ticket through a redesigned service catalog in ServiceNow, eliminating paper processes.
- A user-friendly portal enables employees to carry out basic tasks, access services, and easily find answers to questions.
- A knowledge base deflects frequently asked questions and enables self-service.
The project highlighted that different departments have more similarities than differences, especially when it comes to service issues. By establishing repeatable processes, such as automated workflows, we transformed legal and HR services using the skills and knowledge we learned from optimizing IT services.
When COVID-19 hit, we built a new portal on ServiceNow to create a single HR services platform. In addition to providing a place to browse employee perks, it keeps staff updated on our vaccination programs and answers their questions related to the pandemic.
A seamless user experience across the conglomerate is a challenging task. To achieve it, we spent a lot of time integrating the infrastructure, network, security, and workplace technologies. We automated provisioning and implemented a single-sign-on plug-in, set standards, and aligned governance and functions across all business units. The team also reviewed processes regularly.
Next steps
Now that stakeholders across the conglomerate have seen the power of ServiceNow, they have a huge appetite for new, better services. Optimizing more areas will help strengthen each of our business units as the organization grows, as well as set high standards for what it means to be a JG Summit Holdings company.
Our next steps are to:
- Implement changes faster to improve the user experience at speed.
- Unlock traceability by strengthening the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and adopting a common service data model to connect infrastructure to applications to service.
- Improve productivity further by reducing incidents proactively.
- Optimize more services beyond IT.
Find out more about JG Summit Holdings’ enterprise service management transformation in our Knowledge 2021 session. Registration is free.
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