Introduction
As discussed in the previous articles of the “Digital Enterprise Series”, the main objective of the internal digital transformation is to enhance the User Experience while simplifying, standardizing and automating the delivery of the services across the whole enterprise (IT, HR, Procurement, Finance, Facilities, etc.). While IT and HR are often the starting point for digital transformation, the scope should encompass all corporate functions to maximize the benefits and automate underlying business processes.
The current state
Any company will interact with Employees, Customers and Suppliers. A large part of those interactions is still very manual, unstructured and not traceable neither measurable. That generates a lot of overhead in the business processes and consequently:
- Employees waste time looking for information about procedures and policies, and ring multiple times the service desks and service centers to seek help
- Customers have a bad perception of the company due to the many entry points to reach out and get information, the lack of digital engagement channels and the lack of proactive support
- Suppliers generate a lot of manual overhead within the procurement and vendor management teams by request invoice payment status, master data changes or providing loads of word and excel attachments for risk & compliance assessments
- The various organizations of the enterprise are typically siloed and need a digital approach to share information and collaborate across E2E services and underlying business processes
The digitization opportunity
ServiceNow enables the digitization of all services of the enterprise, so they can be easily consumed by Customers, Suppliers and Employees, and automated through digital workflows hosted on a common platform and sharing common data. E2E Services that require involvement of multiple departments and systems can be predefined, so when they are ordered the platform will coordinate and orchestrate the tasks and dependencies across the departments of the enterprise. Integration with the Systems of Record (e.g. SAP, Workday, SuccessFactors, etc.) allows the elimination of manual non-value-added work through intelligent automation.
As shown in the above picture, when we look at the typical use cases for interacting with a company’s services, we find great similarities across the Employee, Customer and Supplier personas. They will all need to request services or support from the company’s functions, services and processes to perform their day to day job as per the use cases listed below:
- Communities: Employees and Customers are willing to share ideas, questions and issues and help each other. While this approach will help create this culture of social communities within the enterprise, as they exist for consumers, it will help reduce some of the workload for teams in charge of the associated services such as HR, IT, Finance, etc.
- Onboarding/Offboarding: The journey of an Employee, Contractor, Customer and Supplier within the company will start with their onboarding. Several activities will need to be performed by various departments such as HR, IT, Facilities, Procurement, Master Data Mgmt, etc. The same will apply to any lifecycle event happening to those personas, including eventually the offboarding. Onboarding, Offboarding, Marriage, Birth, Move and other lifecycle events must be considered as E2E Services to be provided by the company to the various personas, with the orchestration and automation of the underlying processes.
- News & Knowledge: Proactively publishing news, knowledge, policies, events and other information to Employees, Customers and Suppliers is critical to enhance their experience, speed up access to relevant information while reducing workload for the service delivery teams by avoiding calls and inquiries where possible. The information will have to be targeted to the logged in user, based on their profile and meta data.
- Support & Service inquiry: Any service provided by the enterprise to the Employees, Customers and Suppliers will need to be standardized with a predefined underlying business process so it can be easily consumed and delivered. Relevant data will need to be digitally captured at the various steps of the process to deliver a great user experience, and a digital workflow will orchestrate the tasks to be completed within one or across multiple departments. Predefined service level agreements will be assigned to the E2E service delivery as well as the individual tasks so that the right expectations can be set upfront to the requestor, and escalation can be automated in case of delay.
- Issues & Complaints: Capturing, tracking and learning from issues and complaints raised by Employees, Customers and Suppliers is essential to the Operational Excellence journey. Whether the user is facing an issue with logging in to an application, spilled coffee on the carpet or noticed a mistake in a customer or supplier invoice, they will want a consistent and seamless experience in getting to a resolution as fast as possible. The service delivery teams will want to leverage the data to identify the most recurring issues & complaints to apply a continuous improvement process that focuses on eliminating root causes where possible; or streamlining & automating the resolution.
- Risk Mgmt: Contracting with supplier implies managing the associated risk and compliance. As part of the onboarding process for a new supplier, the due diligence will need to be properly completed. Once onboarded, a regular assessment of that supplier will need to be enforced, with a frequency and depth that will vary according to the risk exposure. Leveraging the self-service risk management capabilities will allow a drastic reduction of the procurement and vendor management teams workload and enable a wider and deeper coverage of risk and compliance.
- Master Data Updates: Multiple instances of large enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SRM, etc.) are often not well integrated, affecting master data teams’ workload on a very manual master data management (MDM) process. The MDM process needs to be digitized, automated, and embedded into the services offered to Employees, Customers and Suppliers. The Onboarding/Offboarding process will automatically update and replicate data changes across all systems, while self-service capabilities with underlying automation will allow Employees, Customers and Suppliers to make master data changes (e.g. banking details change) by themselves, possibly with an approval workflow and automated notifications.
- Digital Workflows: The digital workflows are the engine at the heart of the platform, enabling the definition of a business process that will automate the process steps (actions, approvals, reviews, etc.) required to deliver a service. Those steps will be a mix of manual (i.e. human intervention) and automated process steps (i.e. system integration or trigger to an RPA process). The typical approach to digital workflows is:
- Phase 1: Simplify, standardize and digitize the workflow, while it remains manual
- Phase 2: Identify the actions to be automated based on expected benefits (workload reduction, speed increase, etc.)
- Phase 3: Leverage AI capabilities to further automate and optimize the processes
What about chatbots, virtual agents, mobile app, artificial intelligence and others? Stay tuned! These are platform capabilities enabling the digital transformation, which will be discussed in a separate article that is under construction.
The value
Digitizing those services across the enterprise will typically realize the following benefits:
For Customers, User Experience
- Customer Experience and Net Promoter Score (NPS) will increase, with impact on revenue
- Faster delivery of support/services and resolution of issues for customers
- Ultimately Customer Retention and Attraction
For Employees, User Experience
- Employee Experience and Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) will increase, with impact on productivity
- Faster delivery of support/services and resolution of issues for employees
- Ultimately Employee Retention and Attraction (e.g. Glassdoor ratings)
For Suppliers, Supplier Experience
- Supplier Experience and potentially NPS when the Supplier is also a Customer
- Faster delivery of support/services and resolution of issues for customers
- Company brand and reputation
For the Enterprise, Operational Excellence
- Efforts/costs reduction of service delivery teams, service desks, help desks and (shared) service centers through digitization & automation
- Faster delivery and higher quality of services and underlying processes leading to higher productivity of the requestors
- Increased service transparency and process auditability & compliance
The Total Economic Impact
The picture below provides an overview of the business value realized by 17 ServiceNow enterprise customers. More information about the study made by Forrester can be found here:
ServiceNow TEO for Customer Services
ServiceNow TEO for HR Services
ServiceNow TEO for IT Services
ServiceNow TEO for Security Services
What’s next?
Get in touch with your ServiceNow account manager to discuss further. You may also want to have a look at some of the other articles listed below. And stay tuned, I’m now working on the next set of articles that will focus on an overview of the platform capabilities that support such a digital transformation.
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Previous article: The Digital Enterprise Series – Part II – Enterprise Service Management
Next article: The Digital Enterprise Series – Part IV – Platform capabilities for the Digital Transformation (coming in Q2 2019)
Related articles:
- The Top 10 Things to Get Right When Implementing an Enterprise Work Management Platform
