Publishing house goes digital to increase internal service process quality

Digitalization is revolutionizing the publishing industry, impacting both business models and internal processes. Reading habits are changing, with customers now increasingly opting for digital media instead of printed media. Workflow expectations within the company have also changed. This has resulted in internal services becoming much more comprehensive and digital and moving into IT organization territory. 

A good example of this is the classic onboarding process for new employees. In this case in particular, the HR department and IT organization have to work hand-in-hand to ensure that the new employee is quickly onboarded and able to become productive. 

This process begins well before the new colleague’s first day of work, with the creation and transmission of the employment contract. All necessary work materials must be provided promptly, including office furniture and IT equipment, for example, and access to relevant applications. Equally important is the offboarding process; that is, the preparations for an employee leaving the company. In this case, a reference must be arranged for the employee, all equipment must be returned, and IT systems access should be prevented after the employee’s last working day. 

Implementation preceded by a redesign of processes

For onboarding and offboarding, there are structured processes and workflows across the various service departments. Today, we can digitally map these end-to-end on the Now Platform®. In the past, most of the process-related arrangements between the departments were managed by email. This has now been consigned to history. Key to the successful implementation was a complete redesign of our essential organizational processes.

Onboarding new employees now much faster

The Now Platform offers us a great many advantages. For instance, HR employees are now able to create employment contracts directly on the platform and future line managers can use the brand-new, user-friendly service portal to order laptops or desks for their new team members. The principle is that all employees should be able to use the service portal to order services, of which there are currently around 1,000 available. Thanks to ServiceNow, employee onboarding now takes around half the time. In fact, the entire process can now be completed in just 24 hours.

Audit-compliant processes the biggest advantage

Although the greater speed is of course a bonus, the main advantage for us is the transparency: the central data storage on the Now Platform means that we now have a record of all equipment received by the individual employees when they join the company. This makes the processes transparent and audit compliant. This information is useful both to auditors and to our data protection officers.

The platform has also given us a high degree of transparency over the service processes. Because the platform’s workflow engine controls the workflows, we can run reports based on key figures, which has significantly increased the quality of our service processes. ServiceNow is greatly helping us raise the quality of internal customer service to a new level.

For example, we have transformed our traditional IT service management into a cross-departmental, company-wide service management.

New ideas: workstation allocation and virtual credit cards 

Going forward, we still have many ideas for the further use of the Now Platform. It may soon be possible for employees to reserve desks in a desk-sharing environment and for the finance department to use the platform to issue virtual credit cards to employees. I also find the prospect of using artificial intelligence (AI) on the Now Platform very exciting as it will allow us to make self-service on the service portal even more efficient. Finally, we are also considering the deployment of security operations to help us react even more quickly to threats and vulnerabilities.

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