ON DEMAND WEBINAR
Owens Illinois (OI) is the world's leading glass‑packaging maker. With more than $6.9 billion in net sales operating 79 plants in 23 countries, they launch over 600 new product solutions each year.
With the impending shutdown of their legacy Lotus Notes environment, which includes over 200 custom apps, OI took a group that had been developing ServiceNow ITIL and Service Management modules for years and transitioned them into a team that builds custom apps on the Now Platform.
In this webinar, Owens Illinois will:
- Discuss the processes and tools used to transition to a new platform for innovation
- Present specific examples of apps already re‑platformed
- Share best practices that you can utilize
- Reveal measurable outcomes in both time savings and cost
Q. How did you justify the 20% of contract cost for PA?
A. Frankly, we had a good intro price and found that it could illustrate trends and identify places to reduce costs that we couldn't see before. We've not done a true cost assessment, yet.
Q. How did you deal with the user acceptance for highly customized applications that were replaced by minimum viable products.
A. This was an IT lead initiative, so many were not overly excited to make a switch to a less custom tool than Lotus Notes. Fortunately we had strong leadership that helped to set expectations and drive buy-in.
Q. With the potential of so many business units covered by these applications, did you have to do a lot of domain separated development or is everything essentially in the same domain?
A. We have not domain separated. We rely on appropriate ACL and Query Business Rules to secure the right data at the right time. It has been very valuable to have a single "bucket" where user's tasks can be found and a single maintenance process for everything. Where we find the greatest contention between benefits and costs is with master data management. Companies, Locations, and Regions mean different things to different people so we spend a lot of time getting the different units to agree upon common language, or we have to create extended tables or altogether new tables.
Q. Our business problems are very similar! We're Lotus Notes shop in the process of migrating some apps on SN.
Few questions: 1.) Just because we can, doesn't mean we should -- what criteria besides request>fulfill model for deciding when to develop an app on SN?
A. We also look at team capability to implement and maintain, and the costs of not using another system. For example, for document authoring and automation, we would tend to use a more purpose built tool or platform if we own one. The cost to build on ServiceNow would be too high.
Q. 2.) While flexible, I believe there is a cost to custom app dev on platform. Can you speak to your lesson's learned here?
A. There are costs no matter what platform you select and how custom or out-of-the-box you go. We attempt to balance the user experience costs against the cost to build and maintain custom interfaces and processes.
Q. Did any of your business sponsors have concern with the UI of these applications? (without CMS or Service Portal, the UI can feel clunky to some...perhaps not compared to LNotes) A.The UI doesn't fit all use cases, and in in some of those we've had to create some UI Macros to meet requirements. In general, we have advocated sticking to out of the box forms. It has been important to set expectations before the switch to illustrate the differences between a custom UI solution like Lotus Notes, and the speed and agility of something less custom like in ServiceNow.
Q. The 901 or 901e system....sounds awesome! Can we license that?
A. Reach out to me for more info if interested in similar tools.
Q. I am familiar Components used per all 4 apps but am not clear on Record Producer listed on Demo 3?
A.The record producer takes in the basic information from the end user and uses their input to fill multiple related tables. This simplified the initial user input, but required multiple forms. We could have, and may still, change this to one form with async client scripts or business rules to populate the related tables.
Q. Please outline how the development practices support multiple developers, source control e.g. Git, scoping, update sets and best practices around these?
A. We are still modernizing our development practices, but we do have multiple developers working via update sets. It is much cleaner when in scoped apps, but we do have to work in global app occasionally. The developers do have to communicate, keep their updates small, and test/promote quickly to minimize conflicts. We are still investigating when Git makes sense.
Q. What criteria do you use to differentiate between when to use a 'Service Catalog Item' and a 'Scoped App' when building a workflow?
A. We start with catalog item. When we cannot meet needs with a request/approve/fulfill model or if greater needs exist to manage the captured data then we move to a scoped app or "CreateNow" style app.
Q. Do you have built in BI tools that are comparable to Tableau that can be leveraged? Or can interface with another BI tool?
A.We also are using Microsoft Power BI for some reporting.
Q. How many licensed users are using ServiceNow?
A. Roughly 500 ITSM and 5000 platform.
