7-Eleven has been a part of Mexican people’s lives since 1976 as the model convenience store for quality and service. Part of the Iconn group founded in 1920, 7-Eleven’s expansion has been exponential, with 1,800 stores in 17 states around Mexico. Today, it is one of the country’s most important convenience store chains, committed to offering the best-quality products in key locations with friendly and welcoming environments, 24 hours a day.
ServiceNow and process transformation
7-Eleven was looking for an IT solution that could provide visibility and organization within the company. Its IT team assessed the company environment to determine the current situation and clarify which areas needed improvement.
“We found that many incidents could be resolved with new processes or administrative updates, but others required a solution like ServiceNow,” says Alberto Carrizalez, Chief Operations Officer at 7-Eleven Mexico.
Due to its complex structure, 7-Eleven needed a platform that could provide visibility into its data center, offices, and stores across the country. Its previous environment often required teams to spend hours on numerous manual processes. Configuration management database (CMDB) items were created manually without any relationship between the server and components. This decreased team effectiveness and limited data-tracking capabilities for all areas of the company.
Having already implemented ServiceNow and following the insights offered by its analysis, 7-Eleven realized that improving its IT infrastructure would be a key part of its transformation process. In doing so, the team was aiming to complement its technology landscape with ServiceNow solutions that could provide important new capabilities required by their business model.
“What convinced me was the reliability of the ServiceNow platform. Everything works fine in a PowerPoint, but ServiceNow’s commitment and adherence to the implementation timeline made a real difference,” says Alberto.
A business model built on visibility and organization
7-Eleven decided to implement ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM). Both solutions brought substantial benefits to its service operations, starting with the man-hour ratio.
As a company that carries out huge volumes of commercial transactions, 7-Eleven’s processes are typically subject to five or six annual audits. These processes often involve several banks and other financial entities and require diverse information on the retailer’s operations. Meeting these demands was usually a time-consuming, manual process.
“We used to need an infrastructure manager to keep the information tracked, so we wouldn’t forget things and to keep everything up to date,” says Alberto. “With ITSM and ITOM, we now have that visibility. There is no doubt that this availability has made our lives a lot easier.”
Another significant benefit of the ITSM and ITOM implementations was the ability to establish realistic SLAs for each process.
“By their very nature, the time that any given incident requires can vary. ServiceNow helped us to improve these SLAs and to plan tasks with more accurate data and realistic timeframes,” says Alberto. “These are all now better aligned with the needs of our business.”
New levels of business visibility were another major benefit. With ServiceNow, 7-Eleven has a much clearer view of requests, incidents, and updates, all of which can be evaluated in real time to streamline the decision-making process. Tasks that once took days now only take a few hours.
“When we make an update, we can check that it meets all the required parameters,” says Alberto. “Thanks to Service Mapping, we have everything documented. This helps us to monitor and map our process.”
Service Mapping has also helped Alberto and his team expand their insights, discovering servers, applications, or components that were required for delicate processes and difficult to scale.
The implementation also created collaboration benefits between departments and improved organizational visibility, which helped 7-Eleven democratize information, streamlining interdepartmental processes that, previously, were complicated by missing information.
“Imagine that the purchasing department asks us to enable a new module, or the pricing team asks us to integrate a new promotion or functionality. The success rate for IT is now much greater,” explains Alberto. “This benefit is not only for the IT department but for the company as a whole.”
Continuous operation is the future
The 7-Eleven Mexico team has mid- and long-term plans to track Retail Operations. The company is exploring how other ServiceNow solutions can add value to its service operations, ensuring uninterrupted service.
“For me, success is the ability to ensure and guarantee continuity of our operations. That is how we work, and it translates into outcomes,” says Alberto. “There may be cheaper solutions, but the cost benefit that ServiceNow gives us, we can’t find anywhere else. I get what I pay for, and it’s worth every penny.”
Alberto’s goal as 7-Eleven’s Chief Operations Officer and his team is to continue strengthening the Service Mapping process. He also plans to expand the identification of resources with functions such as Discovery in order to achieve greater visibility and escalating these operations to all stores nationwide.