Gothaer uses the Now Platform as a driver for corporate change

The Gothaer Group
With 4.3 million insured members and premium revenues amounting to €4.4 billion, the Gothaer Group is one of the largest insurance groups and mutual insurers in Germany. The company, which has a tradition dating back more than two centuries, wants to be a leading partner for SMEs and has been one of the most successful insurers for property and casualty insurance for many years on account of its above-average premium growth. In October 2020, Gothaer was named the most sustainable German insurer by Zielke Consult.

Constant change the key to success
Following a period of consolidation, Gothaer is now focused on growth. The aim is to build on existing strengths and offer a new customer experience driven by consistent digitalization, financial strength, and adaptable teams. In addition, Gothaer is focusing even more on serving SMEs and contributing to a sustainable economy.

Being the central IT service provider within Gothaer Group, Gothaer Systems drives innovation and the continuous development of technology and organization across the group. As part of its IT strategy, Gothaer IT is currently redesigning diverse operating and service processes.

“We were looking for a contemporary and powerful platform that would allow us to manage as many operating and service processes as possible in a coherent way,” explains Dr. Marc Seifert, Head of Configuration & Asset Management. Users throughout the entire Gothaer Group should have access to the same modern, integrated, and intuitive tool in their daily work—for all types of processes. “ServiceNow was a perfect fit and quickly prevailed over the competition.” Marc himself joined Gothaer Systems in autumn 2018 to help drive internal agility, among other things. Today, he heads up the ServiceNow platform administration team. “We didn’t want a system that reinvented itself every time we upgraded. Rather, we were looking for a powerful, out-of-the-box tool that continues to develop in annual cycles with a clear view of where we are heading.”

Upgrade to the new release in just four weeks
An important milestone was the upgrade of the Now Platform^® from the New York to the Paris release in autumn 2020. The most important metrics in this context were the number of hours worked by the platform team and the total time taken for the release change. Including all tests and checks, this amounted to four weeks. “That is incredibly fast,” Marc emphasizes. Before ServiceNow, a platform upgrade would have taken six to nine months. “In the old world, we wouldn’t have upgraded to a new release at all unless absolutely necessary,” adds Marc.

Kay-Uwe Kaufmann, Team Leader at agineo, a ServiceNow elite partner based in Aachen, agrees: “Previously, release changes at Gothaer were considered an extremely complex challenge.” The reason for this was that release changes entailed infrastructure updates and software version changes at all levels of the IT architecture. This resulted in long maintenance windows and additional work for employees, especially over weekends. agineo enabled the 10-member platform team to apply the current technology including new processes, establishing such a level of trust that Marc approved the Paris release to go live during normal working hours on a weekday. “From now on, we have the confidence to complete one release upgrade per year on our own,” he asserts.

Setting out for continuous improvement
Accompanying the faster implementation is a new methodology that Marc rolled out at Gothaer Systems with the help of the Now Platform^®. “In the last 12 months, we have been able to respond better to the requirements of our users and, most importantly, act faster,” explains Marc. His goal is the continuous improvement of all the applications for which his team is responsible. His team now works in two-week sprints and is already able to manage multiple topics in different project strands in parallel. “Lengthy planning and implementation cycles have become a thing of the past, which has significantly reduced waiting times for our business stakeholders.”

Overall, not only has ServiceNow simplified and accelerated the Gothaer Systems processes, the new technology and its methodology have also facilitated a more active role for its users in the development process and a closer integration with the business. “When we put our heads together, real co-creation is possible,” says Marc. Thus, ServiceNow is also indirectly supporting the very employee-friendly, family-like culture for which the company is known.

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