Automation to power a global and scalable platform

Population growth and climate change are placing an unprecedented strain on global food security. It is predicted that global crop yields will need to double over the next 35 years to meet consumption demand.

To meet this steady growth, accelerating digital transformation for the global agriculture industry will be critical. To this end, global agri-businesses are racing to create digital workflows, integrate new sensors and deploy IoT at scale.

It is in this evolving era of technology and agriculture that Mindsprint leads the way. With over two decades of being the digital and technology transformation partner for one of the world’s largest $40 billion global agri-commodity businesses, Mindsprint is at the forefront of combining its technology solutions, expertise and experience to enable the industry with cutting-edge technology and business transformation.

“What we know is that manual processes lead to ambiguity and lack of governance”, says Sriram Gopalakrishnan, President and Global Digital Delivery Leader at Mindsprint. “The ServiceNow platform is a game changer. Today, up to 95% of our customers’ incidents are automatically remediated. We’ve built workflows to validate events and incidents automatically, leaving a fraction of tickets requiring human intervention”.

Reducing service resolution times by 30%

Mindsprint’s relentless pursuit of service automation is built on the ServiceNow platform. It deployed ServiceNow IT Service Management Professional (ITSM Pro) and ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) to establish a unified approach to IT processes. ServiceNow App Engine also helped to create custom low-code applications to further digitise and automate manual processes.

“We now have a well-connected system, where workflows are enabled and automation is at the epicentre”, says Mitul Shah, Director—Tools & Automation at Mindsprint. “Zero-touch automation, with no human intervention, auto-routes tickets based on their category. Fulfilling these requests used to take days; now they are completed within hours”.

This service efficiency will be at the forefront of Mindsprint’s value offerings. ITSM Pro uses Predictive Intelligence to analyse and identify trends, and more accurately classify tickets and dispatch them to the right team. For Mindsprint’s customers, ServiceNow has dramatically reduced ticket bouncing, where incidents or requests are passed from one team to another before being resolved. It’s a simplified process that boosts employee productivity and streamlines operations.

“Only one percent of tickets need to be moved from one bucket to another; 99% will land in the right queue the first time. SLAs are being met and reassignments per incident have fallen by 24% on average”, says Mitul.

“Our customers have been able to achieve a 57% reduction in time to close a P0/1 incident, and a 30% reduction in mean time to resolution on incidents and requests”.

SAP modernisation and consolidation

Mindsprint also had a pipeline of custom apps to build, platform customisations to implement, and a large integration landscape to manage. It needed a modern engagement layer and low-code automation to sit on top of a legacy SAP environment consisting of multiple manual and custom processes.

Mindsprint now uses App Engine and Automation Engine to modernise its SAP systems for two low-code use cases: its custom Finance Chargeback and Finance Change Control apps.

“We are also leveraging Automation Engine Robotics Automation Process (RPA) to address key SAP modernisation use cases, including batch job automation, non-SAP job automation, password resets and job monitoring”, Mitul explains. “This extensive consolidation and modernisation effort will include the automation and orchestration of over 20,000 SAP batch jobs”.

It will also increase SAP efficiency and enhance management across multiple business units, with thousands of processes now earmarked for automation with ServiceNow Creator Workflows.

Transforming the employee experience

Metrics aside, the engagement with ServiceNow enables Mindsprint to transform the everyday experience for the employees of its customers. There is now fast and easy access to information, advice and services to 20,000 active users. The employee self-service portal acts as a single source of accurate answers, allowing employees to quickly check health and welfare, payroll and retirement-related information.

The 24/7 service also makes submitting a ticket significantly faster, and users no longer need to wait for an agent to respond. Many issues are now resolved entirely via self-service as questions trigger a range of newly automated processes or direct users to relevant self-service guides. This has achieved a 40% incident deflection in the number of service requests.

“The ServiceNow Platform has simplified and modernised the employee experience”, says Mitul. “ServiceNow ITSM and ITOM are some of the easiest solutions I have used”.

One example is the new digitised onboarding and offboarding process, where employees receive the necessary guidance, support and access to various services from a portal. New employees receive user IDs automatically, are added to relevant groups, and allocated software licences with no human intervention. Another example is the deduplication of incident tickets. ITOM acts as an intelligence layer by ingesting and correlating data to provide a single source of incident, reducing ticket reassignments. This not only improves the efficiency of the IT team but the employee end-user experience as well.

Using the ServiceNow Virtual Agent (VA) enables Mindsprint to fully automate first-line service using a chatbot with a wide range of topics in its knowledge base.

“The most frequently asked questions are the first qualifiers for automation”, Sriram explains. “The chatbot will tailor answers to the person asking the question. It can address queries about holiday dates, current service outages, financial data and even employee-specific information such as individual HR contacts”.

Customised application development with App Engine

Digital and enterprise transformation are Mindsprint’s flagship offerings. As it expands its footprint, Mindsprint’s ability to create end-to-end digital or enterprise applications will come to the fore.

With ServiceNow App Engine’s low-code development, Mindsprint built an end-to-end custom change control application for its customer, allowing users to raise request for project or licence requirements. App Engine has also been used to develop a travel portal where employees can manage business travel in one place, raise requests for business trips, book flights and seek approvals. A comprehensive reporting and analytics dashboard has also made it simpler for Mindsprint’s customer to manage every aspect of the process.

“App Engine is one of the greatest products we’ve seen. We can develop bespoke applications very quickly so employees can use them to make their lives easier”, says Sriram. “Processes that once took days now take minutes”.

Towards greater clarity and transparency

Mindsprint recognises that it must maximise the value of its ServiceNow investments. In a world where customers are seeking emerging tech to solve business challenges, modules powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing and Understanding (NLP/U), combined with automation capabilities will help Mindsprint customers digitally transform their businesses, faster and in an efficient manner.

It plans to use ServiceNow’s Strategic Portfolio Management to bring more clarity to internal and customer projects, understand the gaps between project goals and delivery, and to capture innovation and ideas that will drive business growth while managing costs.

“We want to leverage the capabilities of the ServiceNow platform to ensure we stay committed to our customer’s growth. Projects are often subject to scope creep. Strategic Portfolio Management helps simplify processes, maintain financial discipline and ensure that projects and utilisation are properly tracked”, Sriram adds.

“We want to cultivate an inclusive habit of innovation by capturing and gathering ideas generated. There is a 90% probability that ideas communicated by email or text will be lost. Mindsprint is rolling out idea management across our customer base, so even the smallest ideas are tracked”.

Mindsprint also plans to leverage Software Asset Management and Hardware Asset Management to strengthen customers’ IT governance and control shadow IT.

“We want to eliminate risk and exposure by bringing in software and hardware assurance”, explains Sriram. “This will allow us to track every cyber vulnerability, ensure that security is never compromised, and know who is responsible and how to escalate. Together, this creates greater transparency within the organisation”.