Making travel easier and safer for communities
Transurban is an Australian company that specializes in the construction and operation of toll roads. It manages 22 road assets globally, facilitates around 2.4 million trips daily, and has a customer base of around 10.3 million.
Transurban is also a technology company. Its research and development is focused on developing innovative tolling and transport technology, with the aim of making road travel easier and safer for everyone.
Transurban readily admits to a “culture of customer obsession”. As such, it is committed to gaining a deeper understanding of how each role at the company impacts the customer experience.
“We want to ensure a safe commute from point A to point B,” explains Sanjeev Kalia, ServiceNow Technology Lead at Transurban. “Partnering with ServiceNow to digitally transform our business, we can become more agile and efficient—and provide better experiences for customers and staff.”
Automation drives service effectiveness
Investment in technologies for building customer experiences is paramount. Ensuring a digital-first environment with an emphasis on data management and security is also a priority.
“We have a simplification program running throughout our technology environment,” Sanjeev says. “Our goal is to free up time for staff to focus on strategic priorities, providing better services to our 10 million customers.”
As part of its digital transformation journey, Transurban implemented ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). The deployment supports a range of enterprise services including IT, people and culture, health and safety, procurement, finance, and security.
Since the adoption of ITSM, Transurban has built over 140 catalog items, around 40 of which have now been automated. In 2023 alone, over 92,000 requests were processed through ITSM.
Technology access requests are now one of the fully automated processes. For example, users can submit a request via the self-service portal for applications that they need to access. Once the request is approved, it will automatically go to Sailpoint to make the necessary transactions in Microsoft Active Directory.
“Because it is so easy to raise a request or track its status, we’ve processed 358,000 approvals for tickets in just one year,” Sanjeev says. “On top of this, we had a total of 1.5 million email notifications from ServiceNow. This indicates the high level of user engagement with the platform.”
Transurban has also integrated its virtual agent “Roadie” with Microsoft Teams. This allows users to easily interact with the service desk and track the status of requests via the agent mobile app. Through ServiceNow Knowledge Management, the company published 850 knowledge articles that had 29,000 views in just one year.
“Using the automated workflows within ServiceNow, 7,500 incidents have been deflected from the service desk,” Sanjeev explains. “This has contributed to a 96.9% satisfaction rating in the 2023 CSAT survey.”
“Thanks to the integration capability and configurability of the ServiceNow platform, technology access request alone saved us 125 business days and all types of automated requests saved a total of 576 business days,” Sanjeev adds. “Staff can now focus on the business priorities: helping ensure safer and faster travel for communities.”
Service availability improves vulnerability response
Strengthening the visibility of the entire infrastructure and ensuring data integrity have also been key objectives. With over 17 custom integrations, populating Configuration Management Database (CMDB), maintaining different data sources and keeping them consistent in the hybrid cloud environment were becoming increasingly difficult.
By integrating ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) Discovery with AWS Cloud and the on-premises environment, Transurban now has a trusted single system record in ServiceNow CMDB to ensure data accuracy and consistency.
“Using ITOM Discovery, we can easily discover any new piece of infrastructure that’s been added to our environment. This makes a huge difference in our maintenance tasks,” Sanjeev explains.
Previously, Transurban was using Qualys to scan vulnerabilities and Splunk to monitor any changes in the on-premises and cloud environments. However, there was no visibility into which incident was handled by which support group. With disparate data sources from the legacy custom integrations, it was also difficult for the security team to manage these vulnerabilities.
Integrating Qualys with ServiceNow Vulnerability Response and ITOM Discovery, Transurban can easily detect and prioritize vulnerabilities across the cloud and the corporate’s infrastructure environment. This allows vulnerabilities discovered by Qualys to be automatically matched to configuration items in the CMDB, which are then grouped and assigned to the appropriate remediation teams all automatically in ServiceNow.
“Any slightest delay in detecting vulnerabilities could pose a threat to the business,” Sanjeev says. “Having the integration capability between ServiceNow and Qualys, we saved 945 days in managing vulnerabilities and can respond faster to cyber risks.”
In the cloud environment, people could spin resources up and down that can result in a lot of stale vulnerabilities over time. Thanks to the integrated platform with ServiceNow, the security team can now easily manage stale vulnerabilities by automatically cleaning them up if a detection becomes stale.
With the successful implementation of ITOM for the cloud and the corporate environment, Transurban is looking to roll out ITOM to the Roadside Network environment as the next priority over the coming year.
Streamlining and optimizing software asset management
Centralizing the information of software assets is another priority for Transurban. Previously, each business unit maintained its own records of software purchases, and consequently, data was inconsistent. There was also no visibility in the overall asset overview, such as software entitlement and actual footprint.
Transurban decided to implement ServiceNow Software Asset Management (SAM) to track and manage software licenses across the enterprise via a single platform. Its goal is to improve visibility while optimizing costs and compliance.
Phase one of the SAM project focused on Transurban’s top 10 vendors and validating contracts, entitlements, and usages for them. It also included data collection from over 10 SAAS connectors. Phase two is now scheduled to focus on software optimization. Transurban will also look at the software reclamation rules and see if there are opportunities to reclaim.
“Streamlining and managing software assets from a unified platform with ServiceNow, we anticipate to lower software costs, reduce overlap, and optimize license use,” Sanjeev explains.
Building a full picture
Sanjeev also noted that engaging with a good partner is critical to the success of Transurban’s digital transformation projects.
Thirdera, a Cognizant company, worked with Transurban to roll out the ServiceNow solutions. Thirdera was responsible for the solution design and ensured a smooth and successful implementation for some recent projects such as ITOM Discovery and Software Asset Management rollout.
“Thirdera has been an excellent partner. They have a lot of experience in ServiceNow and we would not be where we are today without their expertise and support throughout the journey,” Sanjeev says.
Transurban is also considering ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management Professional and Application Portfolio Management in the future roadmap. With all these solutions working together, Transurban expects to have a complete picture of the lifecycle of its assets within the environment.
“We’re also interested in Generative AI and how that can bring down our operating costs and further raise productivity for our frontline staff,” Sanjeev says.
Going forward, Transurban will continue to leverage best practices from ServiceNow and make it an enterprise-wide platform that incorporates a broader range of corporate services.
“We want to build a seamless user experience across the enterprise by automating as many business processes as we can to simplify people’s workloads. ServiceNow enables us to achieve this,” Sanjeev concludes.