Körber Supply Chain uses data to lift customer support

Supply chains make the world go round

Whether it’s that circular saw for those jobs around the house or camping gear in time for a much-needed family getaway, we’re all at the mercy of supply chains. We rely on our go-to retailers to have effective supply chain management systems in place to ensure the efficient flow of goods that fuels our every want and need. Körber Supply Chain—a global supplier of fully integrated and digitised processes—is among the top global warehouse management software providers. It offers differentiated warehouse management solutions (WMS) that tackle varying operational complexities through software, voice and robotics solutions in different industries.

Körber Supply Chain sought to be even more competitive and reliable in an expanding field. It needed to address several internal challenges, including enhanced customer support and more robust ticketing processes with better visibility of real-time data.

A ServiceOps approach for a true service transformation

“When I joined the organisation, there was no visibility to the data that allowed you to make decisions,” recalls Chris Roberts, Governance and Operations Communications-Support Delivery and Operations (SDO) at Körber Supply Chain. Customer service was reactive rather than proactive and there was no differentiation between change, incident, problem or request tickets; the volume of escalations alone was mounting.

With the help of ServiceNow implementation partner, GlideFast, Körber Supply Chain adopted ServiceNow Customer Service Management Professional (CSM Pro) along with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) concurrently to build its own solution.

Within just 84 days, Körber Supply Chain had a fully functional platform.

“Now, the way we handle our tickets, workflow, knowledge and understanding of our customers is systematised,” says Michael McGibbney, SVP Support Delivery and Operations (SDO) at Körber Supply Chain. “For me, it’s the ability for managers to have insight into data and the ability to pull it themselves. We’re putting dashboards and reports together. They can click a button and take action without having to engage with senior leadership. They have it all at their fingertips. I don’t think they ever had the tools to allow them to effect change like this.”

Proactive customer care, not reactive

With the combination of ServiceNow CSM Pro, ITOM and ITSM, Körber Supply Chain can focus on delivering better service to its customers. Providing a single source of truth with a more robust CMDB means that Körber Supply Chain has a clear system of record of its customers’ software and services. And the enhanced visibility from transitioning to a ServiceOps approach means the company can lower incident rates faster. Integration partners, customers and professional services used to open tickets and requests through the same systems. “All that noise now is in different channels,” says Michael.

“There used to be no filter. There was a ton of alerts, just flooding us. ServiceNow kills 90% of the noise, it correlates the right information together and throws it right back under the ticket. We can prioritise. We’re starting to get a clear definition of the problem, accept it, and route and action it effectively. That’s all based on having ServiceNow behind it.”

The company is continuously learning more about each of its customers’ environments and now, all the information is feeding into the Now Platform proactively. 

“We’re actually moving from reactive to proactive,” comments Michael. “I think we’ve had over a thousand proactive activities in the last four months alone. We’ve reduced inventory of aged tickets. We still have more tickets but the ageing is down 58%.”

Saving time, reducing manual effort

The company has a ticket system that’s sophisticated enough to enable the correlation of similar events. It means that employees can go deeper, see how many other customers have a similar challenge, and understand the true nature of the problem so that it can be prevented in the future.

The time from identification to repair has gone down, leading to significant savings. For Körber Supply Chain’s FocusNow customers—its top 50—there has been a reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) from 18 days down to 13 days for all severity levels—a 28% increase in efficiency. Overall, for all customers, there has been a reduction in MTTR from 24 days to just 14 days—a 32% increase in efficiency. And in terms of mean time to acknowledge (MTTA), there has been a reduction of 50% for all Severity 1 cases.

“We have at least two or three man-years of savings already,” says Michael. “Also, we have a daily meeting with all the support leads on all the outputs and escalations every day. It used to take two hours. Now it’s 15 minutes.”

“We see a difference during peak season in retail, too,” adds Chris. “Having ServiceNow allowed us to reduce the volume of tickets coming in by 25%. ITOM and CMDB are now the single source of truth.”

Turning complexity into opportunity with ServiceNow

A key advantage of implementing both ITOM and ITSM in combination is that Körber can lower its expenditure with ServiceNow while realising opportunities to grow revenue. With Körber Supply Chain’s proven success using ServiceNow to deliver improved service to more than 4,500 customers, it’s adopting ServiceNow technologies to help develop and bring to market warehouse management solutions like Körber’s K. Motion Warehouse Advantage (WA).

“In the SaaS world, not only are we taking care of the infrastructure in the platform, but we really have to be an extension of their business processes so that the solutions fit into a bigger ecosystem,” explains Michael. “At the end of the day, when you sell software, you support software. When you sell a service, you support an outcome.”

Thanks to its Warehouse Advantage management solution, Körber Supply Chain can now monitor a customer’s situation remotely and open tickets proactively before the customer even knows there is an issue.

Planning for the future

“We now have a single global organisation with operating objectives and principles,” says Michael. “We have an identity. And the quality and speed of work, as well as responsiveness, have improved dramatically.”

Körber Supply Chain is expanding its ServiceNow technology in a multitude of ways including implementing Impact to help speed time to value across future business goals.

But the company isn’t only using ServiceNow to improve customer service and internal operations. It will be using its ServiceNow technologies and its strong partnership to develop and bring other warehouse management solutions, like Warehouse Advantage, to market for its customers.

“ServiceNow is the foundation for transformation,” says Michael. “It’s the framework that you use to accelerate change. When you think about transformation, when you think about delivery, operations and support, that’s the foundation for building everything else.”