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How NEC improved employee engagement during COVID-19
NEC has been pushing boundaries for 120 years. By breaking conventional business practices, we bring amazing ideas to life, create sustainable and successful businesses for our customers, and ultimately pave the way for a brighter future.
We also help more than 110,000 employees flourish. The secret of doing that at scale is an agile approach combined with a people-first mindset when it comes to employee engagement.
Toward a consolidated approach
Our transformation started in 2010, when we realized we needed stronger data visualization capabilities to get actionable insights that drive smarter business decisions. By 2019, we were ready to take the next step to improve the employee experience and boost engagement.
We identified five initial challenges to address:
- Consolidate 700 complex, siloed systems
- Create a single repository of business data to accelerate decision-making
- Adopt an agile culture to roll out new functionality quickly
- Align business problems with the technology to address them
- Deal with a lack of global governance for technology and organizational processes
The answer? A new digital strategy and architecture built on ServiceNow technology.
Upskilling our team
After defining what we wanted to get out of our digital transformation, we completed the implementation in only seven months. Since ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) was completely new to us, we lacked the know-how to optimize the solution in-house.
What we did have was extensive experience implementing cloud services for internal processes, and we already had a common platform to deploy them securely. Workshops with ServiceNow and support from the customer success team helped us gain knowledge to design a Center of Excellence.
We mapped the functions we wanted to deploy and developed a unique architecture based on NEC’s business needs, creating implementation guides as we went. We divided functionality into three categories:
- Service operations to ensure operational efficiency
- Implementation and deployment capabilities
- Service management to continuously optimize and improve processes
When it came time to launch the platform, the data integration tool allowed us to smoothly migrate all of our data. We also appreciated the authentication tool, which provided secure access to cloud services with single sign-on. Both of these features were crucial to completing the project in rapid time.
Responding to a crisis
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our ServiceNow implementation proved timely. We rolled out ServiceNow Safe Workplace Suite in only two weeks to ensure business continuity in a way that kept our staff safe and productive from home.
The solution is integrated with NEC infrastructure and helped us evolve from rapidly responding to the crisis to redefining and expanding our remote working capabilities—and creating a new normal “workplace as a service.”
Our first priority was employee health and setting up teleworking capabilities. ServiceNow Emergency Outreach helped us keep track of how our employees were doing physically and mentally during the crisis, with dashboards displaying data and artificial intelligence reducing manual input. If someone tested positive, a rapid response workflow told them what to do next to reduce the risk of the virus spreading.
When restrictions began to ease and staff started returning to the office, we configured NEC Digital ID Gate to allow face recognition to admit staff to the premises without having to remove their face masks.
Today, our employees can be productive from anywhere, and they know we take their safety seriously. It just goes to show that with the right technology partner, you can adapt to survive the unexpected—and achieve your digital goals rapidly and without stress.
Learn more about NEC’s ServiceNow rollout in our on-demand Knowledge 2021 session. Registration is free.
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