A forward-thinking approach

Vitos cares for around 44,000 inpatients and 300,000 outpatients every year, making it the largest provider of mental health treatment in the German state of Hessen.

The company is committed to serving patients, clients, and residents with expertise, transparency and trustworthiness in everything it does. It takes a forward-thinking approach to patient care and this approach extends to how Vitos manages its IT processes and IT operating platforms. So when CIO and Head of Group IT, Gerrit Traupe, was looking for a new platform to provide IT services for 12,000 employees, he turned to ServiceNow and the single, task-based architecture of the Now Platform.

“Our budgets are capped, so cost increases can’t be passed on directly to the customer as they might in the private sector”, he explains. “So, it’s essential for us to utilise our IT budgets as efficiently as possible”.

Meeting the need for transparency

For Gerrit, high levels of visibility are a core element of maintaining an effective IT environment, strengthening operational capabilities and meeting vital efficiency requirements. However, the platform Vitos previously used for this was struggling to meet its needs.

“We need transparency in our services, in what we have, what we spend, what we provide, and how we manage everything”, Gerrit notes. “We needed an enterprise-capable solution to deliver this”.

Vitos turned to Frankfurt-based consultancy SOLVVision to help find a solution, and quickly narrowed the field down.

“There was only one solution that offered all the various modules we wanted”, recalls Gerrit. “And that was the ServiceNow platform”.

Gerrit worked with ServiceNow and SOLVVision to develop a comprehensive plan to establish ServiceNow as the central platform to optimise work across people, processes, and systems.

“Our strategy was to focus first on the IT operation, implementing ServiceOps to drive efficiency, alongside Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) to optimise spend”, says Gerrit.

“From there, in the future we can extend our use of the ServiceNow platform to meet the needs of other parts of the organisation, such as HR, gradually expanding it as our core enterprise service platform”.

New levels of oversight and granularity

In terms of IT service and response, the ServiceNow platform enables Vitos to manage processes with significantly greater oversight, and to prioritise requests effectively according to need and urgency.

“Previously, all requests were given the same high level of importance”, says Gerrit. “Now, with intelligent control mechanisms and seamless process algorithms, we can actively control request prioritisation. It’s possible, for example, to escalate incidents where an entire infrastructure fails, ahead of someone forgetting their username. It’s a much more granular process”.

This new level of efficiency is complemented by a central service portal with a growing volume of knowledge articles. In the future, this will enable users to complete straightforward tasks themselves without even having to raise a ticket.

“We are creating a more accessible and user-friendly experience”, Gerrit explains. “Soon users will no longer have to call us to reset a password, they will do it independently via the self-service facility at any time of day or night. It’s a great example of how the ServiceNow AI platform will have a positive impact for our employees.”

Increased clarity and accuracy

The use cases for the ServiceNow platform go much further than incident management and response, and now give Gerrit and his team much-improved oversight of the Vitos IT environment and key strategic priorities.

“The most important functions for me are financial data and IT financial management”, Gerrit adds. “From the contract data, we can also set budget plans, compare performance against targets, and view forecasts for the current year. As CIO, these are fundamental parts of my job”.

The ServiceNow platform also enables new levels of clarity and accuracy in reporting, and greater transparency and information sharing for CEOs and stakeholders across the 17 subsidiaries that make up Vitos, with dashboards enhancing management and decision-making capabilities.

“We can, at any time, provide the important details our business managers are interested in, about IT services, assets, costs, and budgets. This level of transparency was simply not possible before ServiceNow”, says Gerrit. 

A holistic overview

Vitos now manages all group IT contracts through the ServiceNow platform, making key performance indicators and other financial information available through a series of easy-to-use dashboards.

“We no longer have to manually compile information monthly or quarterly with spreadsheets”, Gerrit adds. “With the ServiceNow platform, we get transparency just in time and just as we want it”.

Elsewhere, ServiceNow provides new levels of control over the Vitos software portfolio. The License Management module within Software Asset Management will ensure that licenses are distributed effectively across the organisation, they meet compliance requirements, and that the latest software versions are in use.  

The Now platform is also informing more strategic, high-level decisions around financial planning and purchasing. For example, Hardware Asset Management is enabling a complete inventory of all IT devices and equipment, such as laptops, smartphones, and printers, optimising usage and driving efficiencies and cost reductions across the organisation.

“The ServiceNow platform with both portfolio and asset management gives us a holistic view of all resources, assets, costs, and risks related to each project”, says Gerrit. “This allows us to evaluate accurately whether we should carry out a project based on the available resources at any given time”.

The backbone of the company

With new levels of information and oversight at its fingertips, Gerrit hopes to change the perception of IT at Vitos.

 “Our goal is to be seen as a service organisation, and an innovative, future-ready business partner, helping our colleagues to deliver great healthcare”, he explains.

“A managing director once told me that IT management is the backbone of the company, and if it works properly, the overall Vitos group mechanism works”, he concludes. “To begin to implement that with ServiceNow and make it manageable fills me with pride”.