Keeping the global economy moving

Ocean Network Express (ONE) is a global container transportation and shipping company, operating a fleet of over 240 vessels with the capacity to carry 1.9 million containers. Formed in 2017 from the integration of three successful Japanese container shipping businesses, ‘K’ Line, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL) and Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK), ONE is now headquartered in Singapore, with regional offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and Brazil.

ONE now manages the bulk movement of the food, raw materials, and finished products that power the global economy for thousands of customers worldwide, operating 170 services to 120 countries every week.

Creating value and streamlining processes with automation

In a highly competitive marketplace, growth in fleet size and carrying capacity, alongside competitiveness through cost control and efficiencies, are key anchors of ONE’s ambitious business strategy to 2030.

“Ours is a very asset-heavy industry requiring large investments in ships,” explains Kosuke Wada, Executive Vice President, Corporate and Innovation at ONE. “But growth must go hand in hand with sustainability and environmental protection, and we take our responsibilities in this area very seriously. Reducing our CO2 footprint is very important, both for us and our customers.

“Technology is also an important differentiator for us,” he adds. “It’s an enabler to operate our ships efficiently and for 24/7 communications with our onshore locations, to share information and make good, data-driven decisions. This is how we create value, maximize profitability, and meet our goals.”

ONE has worked with ServiceNow since the business launched in 2017, with the company steadily expanding its use of the Now Platform’s single architecture and one data model, to simplify tasks, control costs, and drive value and growth at scale.

With ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) already firmly established in one of the three merging organizations, an early decision was taken to confirm ITSM as ONE’s central IT support platform.

With customers, employees, and a huge supply chain dispersed around the world, ITSM ensures that ONE has visibility and control, on a single platform, of the IT support services that keep the business functioning efficiently, both offshore and onshore. For example, the company operates numerous bespoke applications that provide core business services for customers, which must be maintained and always available.

“ServiceNow provides an important backbone, streamlining and automating processes, and providing overall control for us,” explains Atsushi Maeda, Section Manager, Planning and Lab, at ONE Tech Stop Pte. Ltd., a subsidiary that provides IT solutions and support throughout ONE’s extended network of businesses, customers, and partners.

“We have more than 3,000 ITSM users around the world. They submit tickets for support, while our technical teams use it extensively for secure, scheduled change management activities, and incident management for fast and efficient issue resolution.

“We’re always working to extend the use of ITSM by all our teams,” Atsushi adds. “The support desks and teams can reduce communication by emails, chat, etc. and work efficiently.”

Improved project clarity and transparency

At any one time within ONE’s diverse, geographically dispersed organization, many hundreds of individual projects are underway to address a wide range of operational challenges, and to innovate and unlock new business benefits.

Without centralized visibility of those projects, there were inevitable risks of siloed activity, duplicated effort, and missed opportunities to share great ideas and best practices.

Historically, projects were managed on spreadsheets, using different methodologies and reporting formats. Ownership, accountability, and measuring successful outcomes were, therefore, all extremely difficult.

“It was also very difficult to know what the true scope and scale of an activity was, and impossible for everyone to get on the same page,” explains Eduardo Diaz, Director of BPIT Strategy & Innovation at Ocean Network Express (North America) Inc.

“We needed to establish clarity and transparency across our organization, and improve communication to enable informed decisions around resource planning and prioritization of our strategic initiatives, to ensure that we were investing in the right projects for the right reasons.

“ServiceNow is a proven, respected solution at ONE, so it made perfect sense to use ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM),” Eduardo continues. “SPM is an end-to-end platform and system with all the features and functionality—capturing ideas, demand, projects, resource management and reporting—to achieve our goals.”

Eduardo and his colleagues worked closely with Atsushi’s in-house ServiceNow practitioners to define the precise requirements for ONE’s SPM system, embracing both IT and other, non-IT projects, leveraging as much out-of-the-box capability as possible.

A carefully considered launch of SPM shared the approach and the solution across the organization, capturing all existing projects in one connected, searchable database, and in one format. Using standard forms and information-gathering methodology was the key to enterprise-wide transparency.

“With everything in SPM, we can start to make sense of it all,” explains Eduardo. “Everyone can access a one-stop shop of information, and track the status and progress of projects. The creation of an Idea Portal has transformed our ability to capture innovation in a standard format, with the information we need to make a proper assessment of each idea’s viability.

“Now we have a gateway for people to submit great ideas any time, and for those ideas to be nurtured in collaboration with colleagues until they are ready to be converted to a live project. Having everything in one place has brought our regions closer together too, with joint brainstorming on ideas and sharing best practices around the world.”

He adds: “We know exactly how many live ideas we have in the system, the work ongoing on each, and how many have been accepted and are converting to live projects to be executed. The same dashboards are available for demands and for live projects, with transparency and accountability driving more focus, and pushing the achievement of objectives on time, on budget.”

Next on the SPM agenda is the creation of project templates to equip individual project teams with standardized tools with which to deliver their own projects.

Standardization created in SPM is also helping ONE to be more agile in its response to changing market conditions and evolving customer needs, with visibility and control enabling faster, more efficient solution development. Armed with live data and a complete picture, ONE’s management can now make informed decisions about priorities, resources, and skill levels appropriate for each challenge.

Faster app development for speedier services delivery

ONE is constantly seeking to extend its use of automation to drive operational efficiencies and improve productivity, with one increasingly important resource at its disposal: ServiceNow App Engine.

When the company wanted to improve its procurement processes, its inhouse IT team used App Engine’s low-code development capabilities to build and launch a bespoke application that is now used to approve the purchase of many standard business services and supplies.

Not only does the application save time for approvers and speed up the delivery of important products and services, with all data captured in ServiceNow and integrated with ONE’s accounting system, invoice reconciliation is streamlined and transparent, with payments matched to orders and approvals.

“ServiceNow is our go-to platform for automation,” says Atsushi. “It makes sense for us to use App Engine to build applications like this, which improves governance, control, and reporting of our procurement activities.”

As ONE continues to extend its use of ServiceNow, the company is also using ServiceNow Impact to maximize the value of its investments and the benefits they deliver, for both ONE and its customers. Impact is a human and AI-powered value acceleration solution that includes tools to help organizations optimize their platform performance.

ONE used the health assessment accelerator on its IT instance and identified areas that could be optimized, triggering further enhancements to its security profile. These enhancements resulted in a 17% increase in their security score.

Meanwhile, ONE is also exploring more ServiceNow solutions to better visualize its services. “ServiceNow is playing an increasingly important role in our organization,” concludes Atsushi. “From simple use cases like building applications to resolving some of our most important challenges, such as how to manage our entire project portfolio, ServiceNow always has the answer.”