Keeping the world in motion

If you’re traveling by bicycle, car, bus, train, or airplane, there’s every chance that the Schaeffler Group has designed and manufactured vital components that keep your chosen mode of transport on the move.  

Thanks to the Schaeffler needle roller bearing, one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, its efficient, intelligent, and sustainable products are found throughout the transportation and mobility industries.

Its equipment is helping the transition to clean energy too, within wind turbines and hydroelectric power systems, industrial automation, and robotics.  

A platform for digitalization and intelligent automation

The group is an enthusiastic adopter of breakthrough technologies and has partnered with ServiceNow since 2018, positioning the Now Platform as its core service management platform to connect, automate, and modernize work in every corner of its business.

“My dream has always been to provide our agents with a single service management platform with everything in one place, that takes away the need for them to constantly jump between different systems and tools,” explains Christian Kögler, Digitalization Manager at Schaeffler.

“For us, ServiceNow is that platform, with bi-directional connections to our various systems of record, where we engage, manage, and deliver all our services, and capture all our data.”

The partnership has produced notable achievements, including the creation of a Schaeffler ServiceNow Center of Excellence and a one-stop-shop service portal for all enterprise services. The company used ServiceNow to coordinate its global COVID-19 vaccination program for all its employees and has automated all IT onboarding activities for employees and approved contractors.

Transforming its shared service organization

A key focus for the partnership has been Schaeffler’s global shared services organization (GBS). GBS has steadily extended its use of the ServiceNow AI platform for business transformation, enabling its service centers to deliver more than 500 IT, finance, HR, purchasing, and logistics services on a large scale to its diverse and dispersed teams in Europe, the Americas, and Asia Pacific. Service center agents handle more than 300,000 finance, HR, purchasing, and logistics tickets per year, submitted by more than 20,000 users. Connected digital workflows across the enterprise, streamlined intake and routing, and improved data quality and transparency have enhanced performance, greatly reduced manual tasks, lowered costs, and increased efficiency, accelerating business outcomes across the enterprise with a single AI platform. The user experience has been transformed for employees and customers alike.

At the heart of the GBS environment is ServiceNow IT Service Management and HR Service Delivery. The engagement layer for employees is a one-stop-shop service portal, also available as a mobile app, with Integration Hub enabling Microsoft Teams for a collaborative and productive experience while also connecting to core business systems.  

GBS service center agents use dedicated agent workspaces powered by ServiceNow to bring together all customer information and history, ticket management, and collaboration tools in one place to handle and resolve multiple issues simultaneously, faster, and more efficiently.

One platform for service management orchestration

Building on these successes, Schaeffler is now busy further embedding the Now Platform, its single data model and architecture, into its ecosystem of business-critical systems such as SAP S4/HANA, Microsoft Teams, and UiPath with Integration Hub. Its mission is to establish ServiceNow as the backbone of Schaeffler’s GBS.

“ServiceNow is a key enabler of our shared services transformation,” explains Christian. “We want to improve speed, quality, and user satisfaction even more by further integrating ServiceNow and utilizing its capabilities in business and IT workflows to standardize and orchestrate processes throughout our environment.

“With a cross-functional digitalization approach, we can resolve pain points in transactional processes across the business. And when we fully capitalize on the game-changing attributes of ServiceNow AI Agents, for example in producing short accessible summaries from long, detailed knowledge articles, the potential time savings and productivity improvements are enormous.”

Automating the purchase order confirmation process

To demonstrate the value of its approach to hyper automation, Schaeffler selected a procurement workflow—incoming purchase order confirmation—that has historically involved multiple manual tasks and built-in inefficiencies, and created a new workflow using ServiceNow App Engine.

Previously, a procurement specialist needed to manually process incoming purchase order confirmations—with more than 50% created as PDF documents and delivered via personal email.

The specialist would manually compare data and decide who to approach in the event of a price or delivery date deviation—the cause of 90% of cases—requiring numerous emails and individual follow up. All changes made within thousands of documents every week had to be completed manually before being uploaded to multiple systems such as SAP and Coupa. This approach was inefficient, prone to manual errors, and took agents away from high priority work.

The ServiceNow AI platform for business transformation automates the processing of incoming order confirmations as the bi-directional orchestration system, integration layer, and user interface, utilizing AI at key points in the process. In addition, the integration with Teams makes it easy for the user to check the deviation with the correct individual, allowing for faster and more accurate fulfillment.

By modernizing the purchase order confirmation process, Schaeffler has improved the user experience while accelerating enterprise resource planning and data quality. Average processing times for each order are down from days to less than four hours.

More than 75% of previously manual processes are now automated and completed without human intervention. As a result, ticket volumes from requesters asking for the purchase order status are also down by as much as 80%.

Process and data accuracy has also reduced the input required by numerous business units in the resolution of price and delivery date deviations and discrepancies. Insights into the reasons for mismatches are enabling underlying processes to be analyzed and continuously improved. It has also created a fully transparent and structured automation template that can be applied to numerous time-consuming and inefficient processes.

Critically, process automation with ServiceNow is helping to reduce delays receiving vital components for Schaeffler’s time sensitive, deadline-driven manufacturing operations. Here, unexpected production downtime has substantial ripple effects, for example in the automotive sector with its complex, interconnected, and interdependent supply chains.

Huge cost savings and enhanced collaboration

“This is an outstanding use case that proves the value of enterprise-wide digital transformation and process automation and demonstrates how ServiceNow is transforming the way we work,” says Christian.

“By freeing our procurement teams from time-consuming manual tasks, they have more time to focus on pure procurement, discovering potential suppliers or negotiating better prices or mutually beneficial deals. The potential result of a negotiation that produces a 5% or even 10% price reduction could deliver huge cost savings.

“But the benefits triggered within this one example extend far beyond the order confirmation process itself. Improving the speed and efficiency with which these issues are resolved helps to develop deeper and more fruitful relationships with our customers and partners—and internally too.

“Taking another example, when we automate HR processes, our HR teams have more quality time to assist colleagues with personal support and advice, which makes for happier, more productive employees.

“Automation frees up people to be more productive. The cumulative value of improving as many of these interactions as possible can transform purely transactional relationships into true partnerships, unlocking new opportunities for business collaboration and mutual success,” concludes Christian.