Empowering farmers to do what they do best

With its wide, lush pastures and large cattle herds, it is easy to see why the dairy products market is a dominant sector in New Zealand’s economy—and one of its most valuable exports.

Fonterra, New Zealand’s largest company, leads the sector. As one of the world’s largest dairy operators, it produces 16 billion liters of milk annually, sold across 140 countries and accounting for 30% of global exports.

As a dairy co-operative with over 5,000 New Zealand farmers, Fonterra’s focus is to provide the best possible tools and services to farmer shareholders so they can focus on what they do best: producing world-class milk.

“ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation,” says Scott Pyles, CTO at Fonterra. “We can take advantage of the built-in automation to connect the dots across the enterprise and make our processes more efficient.”

Building a single, trusted system of record for all IT data

Prior to ServiceNow, Fonterra relied on disparate systems and tools for IT services, which prevented it from seeing an accurate view of its IT infrastructure and service performance across 40 manufacturing sites and 50 offices around the world. Fonterra needed a single technology platform to work seamlessly across the enterprise and minimize disruptions to manufacturing operations. It also prioritized maintaining accessible and easy-to-use services for over 21,500 employees and contingent workers to help boost productivity and offer better services to customers.

Since 2020, Fonterra has gradually implemented the ServiceNow platform for multiple business functions, including IT, people and culture, global business services, risk, and security. Underpinning the platform is a clear and solid Configuration Management Database (CMDB), so Fonterra can easily expand ServiceNow’s capabilities. With evolving business needs and multiple sources of CI data, it is an enormous challenge to deliver consistent data and ongoing maintenance.

Victoria Helps, Service Assurance Manager at Fonterra, and her teams are always up for a challenge. They are responsible for ensuring that Fonterra’s IT services run smoothly and efficiently. Alongside ServiceNow partner, Deloitte, Victoria and her teams rolled out a ServiceNow CMDB project for IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and Hardware Asset Management (HAM) that consolidated siloed tools into a single AI platform with ServiceNow.

“The project was born from taking a step back and looking at how we can build a solid foundation for CMDB and deliver good IT services,” Victoria notes.

“When we have a single, trusted system of record for all CI data, it gives confidence to the business that we can move on to the next project much quicker,” Scott adds. “An accurate CMDB means that we can resolve service issues faster, reduce security risks, lower costs, and make better data-driven decisions.”

Accelerating resolution with the AI platform

Fonterra runs an outsourced support model that includes technical engineers, service desk agents, on-site support staff, and event monitoring team. By deploying ServiceNow ITSM and ITOM on one AI platform, Fonterra’s service desk has complete visibility of its IT service performance. It can manage all IT requests across the enterprise, improving incident response times and solving issues faster.

After consolidating multiple tools into a unified portal underpinned by ServiceNow Employee Center, employees can easily log requests and track responses from the service desk via ServiceNow ITSM.

But with around 90,000 ITSM tickets month on month, Fonterra wants to improve its knowledge base and encourage more employees to use self-service, ultimately freeing up the service desk to focus on issues that have a bigger impact on business operations.

“We make it mandatory to attach a knowledge article with an incident using Knowledge Centered Service for technical teams and ServiceNow Knowledge Management for employees,” Victoria adds. “For example, when employees search for answers to questions or issues via the portal, machine learning is used to locate relevant knowledge articles. They can look at those articles for prior incidents and self-serve answers.”

If no answer is found through self-service, employees can submit a case via the portal and the service desk assigns the ticket for resolution. Since rolling out CMDB, some of these tickets are now assigned automatically, and further AI and automation is in the pipeline as the ServiceNow deployment matures, specifically starting with HAM Pro.

Using ServiceNow Predictive Intelligence, the service desk can now review and analyze the CI data with the relevant knowledge articles appearing on the side of the agent workspace. They can then quickly determine the right team to work on the issues and avoid delays in the resolution process.

“Using the AI capabilities within the ServiceNow platform, we have reduced the average mean time to resolution for high-priority incidents by 92%,” Victoria adds. “While the overall volume of incidents has fallen by 66%, the average time to fulfill a request has also dropped by 54%.”

Victoria explains that Fonterra’s outsourced partners typically have multiple teams, so it was difficult to ask them to reopen a ticket when it was wrongly assigned. With ServiceNow, the service desk and other teams can work collaboratively to resolve issues quickly and boost the overall employee experience.

“With continuous improvement in service performance, we have achieved an average customer satisfaction score of over 95% for both resolved incidents and closed requests in the last few months,” Victoria adds.

Since the introduction of ServiceNow Major Incident Management, Fonterra now has a well-coordinated response process to accelerate resolutions and minimize the impact of service interruptions.

“In the past, post-incident review processes were completed by a vendor 10 days after resolution,” says Victoria. “With ServiceNow, our Problem Manager can start the review process in less than 48 hours, an 80% reduction in time. This helps to prevent another potential major incident almost immediately.”

Ensuring service availability and security for manufacturing

Service availability is critical for Fonterra. Outages or service degradations can impact manufacturing operations, negatively affecting farmers and other parts of the supply chain.

As part of the CMDB project, Fonterra ingests CI data from its third-party operational technology (OT) tool directly into ServiceNow CMDB. Together with ServiceNow Security Operations and Integrated Risk Management (IRM), this provides better visibility into system availability at manufacturing sites, enabling the support team to respond quickly in the event of any cybersecurity threats.

“Using the ServiceNow AI platform, we now have the best practices to ensure that all our CI data is consistent and minimizes risk to the business,” Victoria says.

With clear data and team alignment, issue detection, resolution, and review is much faster with ITOM Service Mapping and AIOps with Event Management, Fonterra has reduced the number of incident tickets created by events by 90%. This gives the support team time to focus on other strategic tasks.

Enabling effective hardware asset governance

As a global dairy exporter with over 21,500 staff scattered around the world, Fonterra wanted to effectively manage its hardware assets and minimize waste and resources. By adding HAM to the ServiceNow platform, the company now has a clear, central system of record to track asset details, such as asset location and retirement date.

For example, Fonterra is rolling out new mobiles and laptops for 14,000 users and using HAM to create a process to refresh 3,600 mobile phones. Those who are eligible for an upgrade are asked to provide a shipping address after the workflow receives approval from their line managers, then the information goes directly to our supplier to deliver the replacement mobile phone. Old devices are then decommissioned and removed from the register list.

“Using the automation within the ServiceNow platform, we now have fewer aging assets in use and reduce risks to the business,” says Victoria.

Victoria adds that Fonterra is looking to upgrade the workflow automation capabilities of HAM to provide new levels of insight and transparency to the business.

“HAM Pro will allow us to fully automate the entire asset lifecycle and track when the assets are installed, who is using them, and the warranty dates, so we can make better forecasting and cost control decisions.”

Delivering advanced and more reliable services

According to Victoria, clear leadership, agile delivery, strong focus, and good communication are just some of the key success factors that allowed the platform project to be completed in just six months. She adds that a technically competent delivery partner is important, and that the partner needs to be able to work with internal technical experts as well as the ServiceNow team.

“We worked with Certified Master Architects from Deloitte and they made a real difference to the thought leadership and resolution of complex issues,” Victoria explains. “Deloitte delivered the project on time and within budget and we are very happy with its service.”

For Fonterra, the journey with ServiceNow continues. With the latest upgrade of the ServiceNow platform, it sets the foundation to add GenAI capabilities into key workflows across multiple business functions.

“People and Culture is the most advanced team in using the ServiceNow platform,” says Victoria. “They’re leading the way to pilot GenAI for HR processes. We are also getting a lot of interest in how ServiceNow’s AI Agents can best work for our ITSM processes.”

ServiceNow’s AI platform also provides Fonterra with an enterprise-wide single source of truth, giving it the confidence and capacity to focus its efforts on the areas that really matter. Fonterra’s leadership can make key decisions and formulate bigger strategies using trustworthy data instead of inconsistent figures and guesswork.

“Using ServiceNow as a single, intelligent platform for our business transformation, we have the governance in place to deliver better, simpler, faster, and secure services to our employees, customers, and suppliers,” Victoria concludes.