Driving seamless people experience

Lion is a leading beverages company in Australasia, with fast-growing operations in the United States of America.

As a global beverage organization, the ability to keep production running, trucks on the road, and customers and suppliers happy is critical to maintaining a healthy balance sheet. Complexities in manufacturing and distribution processes, together with a diverse workforce that ranges from brewers to salespeople, have placed increased importance on the need for Lion to transform its technologies and data, which form the backbone of a successful supply chain.

“We wanted to maximize the value of our existing technology investments, streamline operations, and deliver a seamless people experience,” says Emma Martin, People Experience Director at Lion. “ServiceNow has played a significant role in our business transformation journey.”

Unifying the employee experience with the AI platform

Digital transformation has been underway at Lion for the past six years. As a fast-moving, customer-obsessed, and consumer-product organization, Lion wanted to simplify key work processes within its People and Culture operation and empower employees to focus on supporting business growth.

True to Lion’s employee value proposition of Don’t Settle for Ordinary, delivering an experience that empowered its people to ‘make the moment mean more’ was essential.

Before ServiceNow, Lion used SAP Success Factors and disparate legacy tools to manage HR requests throughout the employee journey. With such a complex and siloed environment, it was difficult for employees to know where to go and find the right information to get things done. There was also a patchwork view of what work needed to be completed, causing frustration for the HR support team.

Lion decided to adopt ServiceNow as the AI platform for business transformation, to connect and automate processes across multiple functions, systems, and touchpoints along the employee journey—from pre-onboarding to onboarding, retention, and exit.

By deploying ServiceNow Employee Center with HR Service Delivery (HRSD) and IT Service Management (ITSM), Lion now has a one-stop shop for self-service requests related to HR, IT, and finance. With one platform and data model, 95% of cases for 49 services offered by People and Culture are now tracked and managed via the self-service portal. This helps to increase productivity and deliver exceptional employee experiences.

“Having a unified portal with ServiceNow, the number of touchpoints for employees to access People and Culture services has been reduced from over 56 channels to just one,” says Emma. “It runs so seamlessly that people don’t even notice it. We now have information at our fingertips without repeating anything or long waits.”

Using ServiceNow HRSD with the AI-powered Virtual Agent, employees can also easily find information and request help directly from a chatbot—such as checking annual leave balances or finding out more about learning and development programs—rather than contacting the service desk.

“With more cases resolved by self-service via the ServiceNow AI Platform, we have realized a 350% uplift in portal usage and a 40% increase in task success rates in the last seven months alone,” says Christopher Lois, Head of People Experience Operations at Lion. “The improved efficiency has resulted in a 75% reduction in customer response time and a 77% reduction in resolution time. This has significantly reduced our cost per serve to global benchmarks, which is a phenomenal result.”

Christopher adds that the integration of ServiceNow with DocuSign has helped to cut generation times for employment contracts from hours to minutes. The business also reports over 14,000 instances of knowledge article usage in the seven months since it went live—and the figure is growing. Around 250 articles have also received high user satisfaction ratings for their usefulness. This has helped improve the average satisfaction rating for the People Services experience from around 75% to over 85% and to 92% for its onboarding experience.

“The time savings we’ve achieved through the self-service knowledge, redesign of our HR services, and Virtual Agent capabilities mean our employees can focus on more important work to support the business,” Christopher explains.

Using the dashboard within the ServiceNow AI Platform also gives Lion’s People and Culture team greater visibility to track service performance, monitor the types of issues handled, and evaluate resolution times.

“We’ve had great feedback from all levels of the organization—including our leaders and frontline team members—around the ease of accessing information,” Christoper says. “I’m also having more conversations with other business units that are interested to know how we achieved that transition!”

One platform for enterprise automation

From the perspective of IT service management, Lion faced challenges in delivering seamless services to employees. Before ServiceNow, the company used Cherwell, but a lack of specific workflows and forms caused extensive delays in responding to requests. The service desk also had to go through multiple touchpoints when handling a request.

“We needed a solution to give our support team the visibility to resolve issues faster and deliver a better experience to employees,” says Mark O’Leary, Service Leader, IT Service Management and Governance at Lion.

As Lion’s IT support partner already used ServiceNow, Mark and his team saw an opportunity to leverage the partner’s skills and experience in the ServiceNow AI Platform to fast-track the move from Cherwell to ServiceNow ITSM. By establishing a single platform to track and manage incidents and requests, Lion could accelerate its transition and reduce implementation costs.

Since the transition to ServiceNow ITSM, Lion has clearly defined service-level agreements (SLAs) with its IT support partner. As a result, the partner can actively monitor Lion’s service performance and enable faster resolution of Service Desk tickets, particularly for P1 or critical incident tickets.

Using Service Catalogs and automated workflows to assign tickets directly to the Resolver Team, the volume of IT tickets has been reduced by 60% in just one year.

“ServiceNow offers a unified and extensible platform with consistent data,” Mark explains. “We now have the insight we need to track service performance for various ticket types.”

Lion has also created 448 knowledge articles in the ServiceNow AI Platform, of which 138 are customer-facing. Users can now access self-serve information on simple incidents such as password resets or self-service bitlocker, without involving support staff.

“Thanks to the automation and self-service capability in the ServiceNow AI Platform, the call volume to our service desk has decreased by an average of 35% per month over the last one year,” Mark adds.

User surveys have also highlighted an average employee satisfaction score of over 90% for the ease of access and use enabled by managing requests through a single platform.

IT and OT convergence strengthens manufacturing resilience

As a global beverage company with a diverse portfolio of consumer products, ensuring system uptime is critical to a smooth manufacturing operation. With approximately 350 application instances across eight production sites, Lion needed a common process and workflow to capture different IT issues in its operational technology (OT) environment and minimize business risk.

By connecting IT and OT processes with ServiceNow ITSM and Operational Technology Management (OTM), Lion now has a single system of record and workflows for incident management, problem management, and change management for OT assets.

For example, Lion uses OT Foundation and OT Visibility within the ServiceNow AI Platform to aggregate and map 800 configuration items (CI) data for 300 equipment model entities across different manufacturing sites into the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). It also leverages ServiceNow Industrial Workspace to provide insights into dependencies and relationships between equipment model data.

“Using ServiceNow as a record of evidence for our OT assets, we have created an environment with improved visibility, governance, and security,” says Graham Skidmore, Automation and Operations Tech Manager at Lion. “Our IT team now has better insight into what is going on with applications. This allows them to respond to IT issues at manufacturing sites quickly and maximize system uptime.”

Reducing cyber risk at the heart of business

In the past, Lion used Jira to manage cyber-related incidents. However, this was inefficient as the solution was not designed for risk management. With an increase in cyberattacks in Australia and around the world, Lion deployed ServiceNow Integrated Risk Management (IRM) to track and manage cybersecurity risk and incidents.

Using Risk Management within IRM, Lion now has better visibility to prioritize activities based on automated risk scores, and then assign tasks to the right IT team for resolution. Improved visibility also enables the IT and cybersecurity teams to collaborate more effectively on each incident, helping minimize unforeseen outages at manufacturing sites.

“Using ServiceNow with Jira to assess and monitor cyber risks, we have reduced the number of active risks by 60%—from 200 to 80—over the last three years,” explains Nik Anand, Cyber Security Governance Specialist at Lion. “The time savings have allowed us to focus on developing security standards and contributing to our wider security strategy.”

Continuous improvement of the user experience

With the successful implementation of ServiceNow across IT, OT, and Risk, Mark and his team are working with ServiceNow partner, EY, to further uplift the usability of the platform, such as improving the Service Catalog and the underlying workflow for software license requests.

Within People and Culture, Emma and Christopher are looking to drive continuous improvement on SLAs, knowledge articles, service catalogs, and activities to further enhance employee journeys. The goal is to deliver more personalized user experiences through the self-service portal. They also want to explore Now Assist’s GenAI capabilities for chatbot and back-end agent responses in the future roadmap.

“Using ServiceNow as a single platform for business transformation, everything just works seamlessly across different processes,” Emma concludes. “It also makes it easy for employees to get the help they need.”