Orion transforms approach to global service delivery with ServiceNow

IT underpins the production of Carbon Black for Orion
Orion Engineered Carbons (Orion) is a worldwide supplier of Carbon Black, a material produced by the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products such as FCC tar, coal tar, or ethylene cracking tar. The company produces a broad range of Carbon Blacks that tint, colorize, and enhance the performance of polymers, plastics, paints and coatings, inks and toners, textile fibers, adhesives and sealants, tires, and mechanical rubber goods. Orion runs 14 global production sites and four Applied Technology Centers.

Orion’s IT service underpins its operation and supports its mission to deliver quality Carbon Blacks and create collaborative customer partnerships. But with a legacy IT service function, Orion found it increasingly difficult to deliver quality IT services on a global scale.

Ben Scherer, Vice President of Global Infrastructure Services at Orion, explains: “When I joined the team at Orion, it was immediately clear that the existing service provider and the tools in place were not able to support a strategic IT function.”

The outsourced IT service provider was difficult to manage and Ben had no control over or visibility into its work. Issues were frequent, as there was no customization and only one language was supported, despite Orion operating in locations across Europe, the United States, China, Korea, Japan, Brazil, and South Africa.

“The overall performance and perception of IT was suffering. We had hundreds of aged tickets, some over six months old, incidents were not followed up in a timely way or closed quickly, and we had no SLAs in place. I knew there was a better way to do things. We needed to empower our team to take a transformational approach to our global service delivery,” says Ben.

Orion needed rapid platform deployment for accelerated IT service delivery
The contract with Orion’s external service provider was coming to an end, providing the ideal opportunity to rethink the IT service approach. Ben wanted to maintain an external IT service provider, but gain the flexibility to use the service delivery tool internally and work more collaboratively.

Orion appointed a new service provider and the two teams jointly adopted ServiceNow. In just five weeks, the Now Platform was deployed and Orion and its service provider teams were up and running with ServiceNow Incident Management and ServiceNow Request Management.

Ben comments: “We had to move fast to ensure the new service platform was in place when our service provider came on board. I’d worked with the Now Platform in previous organizations and knew it was the right choice for a more global and strategically-minded IT approach. A key advantage is the rapid cloud deployment model, which made the deployment process effortless.”

ServiceNow delivers a user-focused IT service environment
The Now Platform has been developed for a customer-focused environment. Users are presented with an intuitive, consumer-like portal to request IT services, log issues, and check the progress of any incidents or requests—from a desktop or mobile browser.

“Users love the simplicity of how they can interact with IT as it’s as easy as one-click ordering from Amazon,” explains Ben. “Incoming email was reduced significantly in the first three months and now self-service is the de facto approach for our workforce.”

The new approach has also dramatically accelerated IT incident and request resolution, through automation and intuitive workflows. Multi-step processes have been optimized for approving requests and handling incidents, with tiering used to prioritize each ticket.

The result is higher service quality that is delivered at a much lower price point—with the cost of the service desk function decreasing by 50%.

Ben says, “Previously, we had around 300 open tickets at any one time but with ServiceNow that number has reduced by 80%. There has been a notable shift away from trouble shooting incidents to focusing on user requests for new hardware, tools, and services.

ServiceNow demonstrates value through visibility and cost savings
Through the cloud-based Now Platform, Orion’s infrastructure services team has complete visibility over the status of all incidents and requests, and this has had a transformational impact on the team’s performance.

“IT service delivery used to be a pain point for the organization. But with ServiceNow, we can easily prioritize and visualize user demand, and better organize our different work streams,” says Ben.

This visibility also extends to key decision makers in the business and has had a positive impact on the perceived value of IT. Performance and service delivery can now be reviewed instantaneously through a bespoke service dashboard to monitor its effectiveness and contribution.

As Ben explains: “Before ServiceNow, IT service performance was always a discussion point in weekly management meetings. The creation of weekly reports was inefficient and took hours to complete. Today, those conversations have dropped from several minutes to a brief review. ServiceNow dashboards demonstrate at a glance how IT is meeting the expectations of the business and it’s easy to move on to more taxing items such as tactical project delivery.”

ServiceNow is the foundation for Orion’s path to continuous development
With ServiceNow forming the backbone of IT service delivery at Orion, Ben and his team are constantly brainstorming the development of the platform, creating a roadmap of new workflows and features, including ServiceNow® Project Portfolio Management.

Ben concludes: “ServiceNow has contributed to significantly advancing the maturity of our IT organization. We have shifted from a reactive to proactive function, where we can apply our internal resources to more value-added projects that are aligned to business objectives. The introduction of ServiceNow marked a step-change for how IT is perceived within Orion. We have become a value-added player in the business and we have seen a notable shift in the way the IT department functions and how the business perceives IT.”

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