Driving excellence with the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team

For more than 100 years, the Aston Martin brand of luxury British sports cars has been synonymous with ambition, innovation, and success. In the world of car racing, the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team transports that tradition to the racetrack.

Aston Martin Aramco has placed in the top five in eight races since 2021. Arming the team with smart tools and technology is crucial to fulfilling its mission to win the Formula One World Championship.

Safety and efficiency are paramount to the team’s success. That’s why it partnered with ServiceNow to help power its digital transformation. The collaboration, which began in 2023, has been a resounding success.

“The fact that we were able to quickly implement ServiceNow—across the whole race team—was pretty incredible,” says Rebecca Adams, IT business analyst on the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team.

Working with ServiceNow has enabled Aston Martin Aramco to connect its people, processes, data, and services so that employees can focus on what matters most: building a lightning-fast car.

Here’s how Aston Martin Aramco is driving excellence, both on and off the racetrack.

Automating IT and facilities requests

Safety and speed depend on a robust IT environment that allows employees to quickly raise service requests. By ensuring requests are accurately triaged and prioritized, the company can equip everyone with what they need to perform their roles, including car design and safety.

Aston Martin Aramco replaced its existing IT service management (ITSM) environment with ServiceNow ITSM. This enabled staff members to access the ServiceNow^® platform through a mobile app. They can make requests and flag incidents at any time, no matter where they are: trackside, in the office, or on the factory floor. Their teammates can then address issues before they affect service.

“ServiceNow allows us to quickly and efficiently log issues we have at the track and gives us a central place to store and report from this information,” says Josh Curry, lead IT trackside engineer on the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team. “The mobile app allows us to log and update issues on the move, which is ideal in the fast-paced environment.”

Both ServiceNow ITSM and IT Operations Management (ITOM) have enabled Aston Martin Aramco to effectively differentiate between—and manage—incidents, requests, and changes. This ability has increased visibility into the team’s IT environment, supercharging decision-making, helping speed up processes, and saving money.

“Our whole industry is based on being the quickest,” says Sioned Edwards, head of IT operations and change at Aston Martin Aramco. “Any time savings we can deliver through efficient incident resolution or request fulfilment in the IT department means we’ve allowed designers, production staff, and engineers to remain productive, or improved their efficiency in delivering performance to the car.”

Streamlining employee experience

Aston Martin Aramco employs world-class talent, and they deserve world-class employee experience. ServiceNow has optimized the Joiners, Movers, and Leavers process by which employees are onboarded, promoted, transitioned to different departments, and offboarded.

Through the ServiceNow platform, the team can help ensure employees have all the necessary IT equipment and software the day they start. Employee experience is seamless from day 1 to an employee’s last day, with strict governance that helps protect the organization’s confidential data.

A major employee experience improvement centered on onboarding and offboarding contractors, Adams says. When an employee on a fixed-term contract joins the team, the organization can automatically generate a leave request.

“This heightens our security because we immediately have that in place, so no one has to make those changes 10 or 11 months down the line,” she explains. “That’s made things a lot easier.”

The ServiceNow platform provides a single source of truth for employees to reference when they need assistance. “We’re an organization with a lot of moving parts, so being able to go to one singular place to find all the information we need is saving us so much time,” Adams adds. “And that’s only going to improve the more we add into the platform."

Enhancing data analytics

Organizations like Aston Martin Aramco rely on data to make split-second decisions and to anticipate service issues before they arise. “Prior to ServiceNow, our IT department often struggled with having solid data to make decisions, track KPIs, or make changes to our infrastructure,” Edwards says. “We are now leveraging the data we are collecting to ensure we deliver a best-in-class service.”

Using ServiceNow ITOM Discovery and Configuration Management Database allows Aston Martin Aramco to manage data more effectively. The organization can make data-driven decisions about which service issues to address and how to help prevent outages from happening in the future.

“If there’s an issue affecting a race weekend, we have flags for that so we can make sure we’re spending time on the right things,” Adams says. “At the end of the day, that’s our business.”

Paving the future

Since working with ServiceNow, the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team has seen increased efficiency and cost savings. On average, the team has reduced incident response time by four hours and saved thousands in costs. The organization is interested in using technology such as generative AI to further streamline operations and take employee experience to the next level.

“We’re competing for fractions of seconds on track,” Adams says. “Any time we can get back in our operations is time we can spend making the car go faster.”

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