Now Platform handles a range of IT challenges
The dairy industry is a fast-moving sector, and international milk producer Emmi is one of many companies that has seen rapid growth in the past ten years. From its humble beginnings in milk processing in 1907, the company has grown into Switzerland’s leading manufacturer of high-quality dairy products, with a strong local presence in 14 different countries. Today, Emmi sells its products in 60 countries around the world, manufacturing them at 50 production sites in eleven countries. It employs more than 9,000 people, of whom around 3,000 are based in Switzerland.
Emmi’s IT team receives requests through various channels from across the entire company, and processing these manually was becoming costly and inefficient. “We couldn’t even attempt to offer a service catalog as we didn’t really have one, nor the processes in place for it,” explains Ricardo Nebot, Head of IT at Emmi Schweiz.
To meet the rising demand on the company’s IT in terms of availability, performance, and service, the team chose to introduce ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). “The ServiceNow solutions are unique in that they offer such a wealth of functions,” says Ricardo, explaining the company’s decision. “The Now Platform hasn’t failed once in the past five years. The high level of performance the system delivers means that we are always provided with sufficient resources to keep our applications highly performant.”
When the Emmi IT team began working alongside their IT partner BitHawk back in 2015, it turned out to be just the start of a long and fruitful journey.
Marcel Leu, Team Leader for Enterprise Service Management Consulting at BitHawk, has been in charge of the project every step of the way. “Organization and change management are very important to Emmi, and it actively embraces the topics,” explains Marcel. He believes that one important factor in the project’s success has been clear role distribution in terms of process responsibilities from day one. Emmi also ensured buy-in to the platform from the outset. This enabled the team to work step-by-step toward maximum automation, which significantly relieves the strain on the Emmi IT department. “The expertise of our implementation partner BitHawk, the collaboration, the exchange of information and the shared learning process across so many areas, has been a huge support in the ongoing development of the solution,” says Ricardo. “The 3.5 FTEs on the service desk would be completely overwhelmed without the portal and wouldn’t be able to keep up with today’s demands,” adds Platform Owner Adrian Schmid.
Self-service concept starts with the “Software Kiosk”
As software provision in particular required a large amount of effort from the team, the first step was to introduce a self-service Software Kiosk on ServiceNow’s Managed Service Platform (MSP). This gave staff the option to order and manage hardware and software themselves, reducing operating and licensing costs.
The next stage was to standardize and centralize the ITIL processes. “Previously, each department was following a different process and using different tools,” explains Adrian. There were several different ticketing tools being used simultaneously, with some tickets sent via SAP Solution Manager and some via the MSP platform. Interfaces are now being used as a workaround to send all tickets through ServiceNow centrally, meaning that all work orders now land in a single system. Responsibilities were also redefined as part of the transformation, and a Business Process Manager designated to manage each ITSM process and develop it further.
Lifecycle Management Dashboard makes cost planning clearer
The first major automation project came in 2019 with drive permissions. Users can now request access to folders and drives across the entire structure themselves, and the permissions are granted automatically by the folder or drive manager. “This process is fully automated, there’s no longer any manual intervention. It’s more than just being able to generate a ticket yourself,” explains Adrian.
That same year saw the construction of the CMDB, which covers Emmi’s entire IT infrastructure. This created a foundation upon which the company could then build the Shopfloor Lifecycle Management Dashboard, which in turn enables Emmi’s IT team to provide the production facilities with data to help them make cost planning for the annual budgeting process much clearer. “We can see the around 1,300 servers we have in the production halls and clearly indicate what needs to be done in terms of security, lifecycles, and maintenance in the coming years,” explains Reto Luginbühl, Head of IT Demand & Services.
With Integration Hub Professional, which the IT team introduced the following year, staff have the option to request a Collaboration Platform in Microsoft Teams through the IT Employee Center, which is then created automatically in just a few minutes. “This point of entry to the Integration Hub gets used all the time,” says Reto. If communication channels need to be created for a particular departmental project, this is also ordered via the IT Employee Center. With pre-configurations set up and ready to go, all of the Microsoft 365 apps needed are provided in the background fully automatically.
Departments can view their own IT usage and manage costs
Last year, the Emmi IT team took another major step forward by expanding its IT cost management system and connecting it to the user information portal. This means that each department now has an overview of all the IT services it is using, the costs associated with them, and the option to manage them itself. “Each cost center manager can see which devices, licenses, and services are being billed to them in ServiceNow, where they can also manage the costs by returning or cancelling devices and services,” says Adrian. The company gets a more precise overview of the IT resources throughout the entire business, which increases efficiency and reduces costs. “It means that we can assign the IT services we provide year-round to the individual departments as transparently as possible,” explains Reto. “It’s also important to note that we effectively reduce costs by reusing hardware and software.”
Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) plays an important role in this. “All IT requests are gathered centrally via SPM. This process is managed by our IT Key Account Manager,” explains Reto. If a department has an IT request, it is submitted as a “Request for Change”. The content and clarity of the request is then checked by the IT team, who work with the department to develop a solution and go through the approval process. Finally, the request is given over to Change or Project Management for implementation.
Staff can order 300 items via the IT Employee Center. More than 100,000 orders have been processed to date. The only way the team has been able to keep up with the company’s growth in the past five years is by implementing automation and managed processes. “In 2022, we were able to relocate all of the requests and error reports to the portal, relieve the strain on the Service Desk, and start looking at new areas,” says Reto. He sees the company’s ServiceNow journey as something of a transformation. It started with a simple Software Kiosk, which has gone on to be developed into comprehensive self-managed services for the staff, as well as controlled and managed ITSM processes.
The success of this journey is clearly reflected in the level of satisfaction amongst the company’s employees, who now have round-the-clock access to the IT Employee Center. In a recent standardized satisfaction survey, Emmi’s IT team once again achieved a top rating of 5.2 out of 6. “Satisfaction is very closely linked to the degree of automation and self-service,” explains Reto. Just one more reason why the IT team will continue to push ahead with automation in the near future, and further develop the IT Employee Center. “ServiceNow is for us in IT what a good ERP is for the business. Simply indispensable,” summarizes Reto.