Enterprise Service Management with ServiceNow

Enterprise Service Management with ServiceNow

Creating a unified service portal for enhanced employee experience
Introduction

A Europe-based manufacturing company uses legacy software for workflow management and employee service within the organization. The legacy system has a complex user interface and requires the user – its employees to access different portals for different processes, resulting in low user experience and miscommunication while resolving their issues. The client organization too faced mismanagement issues and observed a silo effect within the organization. The legacy system incurred heavy maintenance costs as the organization required frequent time-consuming software updates and had privacy and confidentiality issues. The client organization wanted to create a unified portal to increase transparency, efficiency, and productivity within its workforce.

Vatsa Solution: Unified Service Portal Using ServiceNow’s Employee Center Pro Module

Vatsa leveraged the ServiceNow platform and configured and customized its Employee Centre module to simplify the employee services and enhance the end-user experience. ServiceNow offers a single cloud platform to help businesses drive innovation, transform management services, and align their business goals.

Vatsa’s team of experts helped the client develop new plans for the portal and its supporting components. Data management ensured that the data within the departments, primarily IT, HR, Finance, and Procurement remained secure, organized, and helped in real-time reporting. Using the app design studio by ServiceNow, Vatsa developed scoped applications
along with the portal.

A huge part of the project was enhancing the UI/UX of the enterprise service management system. Vatsa delivered customizations of widgets, dashboards, and reporting keeping the end-users in mind. The integration of conversational AI came with various features such as instant service requests, an overview of status updates, speedy acquirement of reports, easy search for knowledge articles, and multiple language translation among other features that
helped the globally dispersed workforce. ServiceNow Dynamic Translation helped translate catalogs and knowledge articles to better cater to the multilingual end-users. A global AI search option was also configured with added functionalities.

Results:

Vatsa enabled the client organization to add value to the business process management of the enterprise with the ServiceNow Enterprise Service Management. The improved user experience enabled the users to get their queries resolved faster. The out-of-the-box workflow management helped request services gain pace, streamlined the workflows, and improved transparency.

  1. The customization of widgets, dashboards and reporting provided an enhanced look and feel of the system, improved the user experience, and streamlined the workflows. The language Dynamic Translation feature made it possible for international users to communicate their queries and problems effectively.
  2. The unified portal allowed easy viewing of the tickets/requests status across functions, staying on top of the schedule, and ensuring that the majority of the SLAs and KPIs were met.
  3.  The client observed reduced turnaround time, seamless ticket management, and faster servicing of requests by using a unified self-service portal with central governance without disturbing the existing backend processes.
  4. Governance was improved due to a unified portal system. Virtual agents were able to provide the first line of cross-platform support and then pass it on to live agents for complex queries if required.
  5. Better visibility over queries and services helped the organization with the business decision-making process.
  6. Scoped applications, particularly for finance, helped primarily with data protection, their own workflows, and seamless processing of request forms. Different modules for IT and HR as well as improved data security and privacy.
  7. The configured global AI search options reduced the manual effort of the end-users helping them navigate through the portal seamlessly.
  8. The new role-based access portal reduced the technology cost of support and maintenance significantly.
  9. Translation services allowed easy interaction between personnel speaking different languages (need not wait for the availability of the same language speaking person, thus saving on time)
Technology and Tools:

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Calibration management Manufacturing

Calibration-management-Manufacturing
Calibration-management-Manufacturing

Calibration management Manufacturing

Transforming a legacy desktop-based management software into an end-to-end responsive web-based management system

A leading manufacturer of IT and office automation equipmentfrom Oman has a range of electronic equipment for healthcare, consumers electronics, telecom, military, security and many more industries. The calibration labs of the company must calibratethese equipmentvery precisely as part of their product development and testing process. The labs use a desktop-based utility to manage the calibration. However, the utility needs significant manual intervention and is it tedious to use, often leading to errors and rework. Being a desktop-based utility, it is also difficult to deploy, configure, manage, upgrade and keep it consistent across all machines and deployments. The loss to business due to the inconsistencies, inefficiencies, rework and product returns due to errors is estimated to be a whopping 20-25%.
To mitigate this challenge, the management team wants to set an automated workflow to manage the calibration process for their calibration labs and build a better utility that is easy to deploy, manage and use,so they could improve their quality and efficiency metrics.

The Vatsa Solution: A responsive web-based calibration management software for improved process outcome

Vatsa designed and developed an internal web-based portal to standardize all workflows and calibrations for the company’s production team. The tool went beyond just recording the calibration values to helping with the entire calibration process. Vatsa achieved standardization in the workflowwith the following functionality:

1) Providing the ability for product teams to create calibration template that can be applied to a group of similar equipment along with their respective expected values, validations and ranges
2) Identifying and mapping the tools or testingdevices to be used for calibrations of an instrument
3) Prepopulating the readings into the calibration template and applyingthe template to each equipment
4) Providing the ability to enter the readings against each machine according to its template along with tracking of any changes in values
5) Defining the schedule and assignment of calibration to individuals and recording the actual calibration
6) Approval or rejection of calibrations and proposing recommendations via the system for the person doing the calibration
7) Evaluating the result of the calibration across all devices for reporting and dashboards to assist managers and leaders in the company

The standard templates created as part of the solution provided all the meta-data measurement type, the master standard, reference standard and standard operating procedure. Also, it defines the number of readings to be taken while calibrating an instrument and whether it is the master instrument that needs to be fixed or the DUC (Device Under Calibration).

Calibration Workflow

The new web-based system managed the following stages of the calibration process
Inward
(Also known as check-in). If the customer is not present in the system, an account is created on the fly.
Job
A Job is created and assigned to a technician and barcode stickers are printed.
Calibration
Calibration of the equipment is performed according to the calibration template and measurement standards of the equipment.
Certificate
A Calibration Certificate is generated as per the recorded readings and specifications.
Outward
(Also known as check-out). DO and invoice is generated for delivery.
Results:

For the calibration lab of the company, the success of their business model lies in their ability to reliably and accurately calibrate instruments manufactured by them as well as other companies.In this project,Vatsa Solutionsbrought extensive technological expertise and experience working with manufacturing companies to deliver many benefits for the company:

1) The company was able to reduce manual errorsand rework by over 80%
2) Time required for calibration reduced by 30% with the end-to-end management and approval process in the new system
3) Significant improvement inquality management and service to their customers
4) The improved time-to-market and quality resulted in revenue growth as well as huge improvements in customer mindshare
5) Instruments are calibrated far more regularly due to active scheduling management
6) Increased transparency for customers of the labs, who are now aware of the status of the calibration of their instruments
7) Easy access, traceability and retrieval of history of instruments and their calibration statuses at various points for better management and troubleshooting

Technology and Tools:
ASP. Net, MSSQL server, MVC

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Manufacturing Intranet Portal

Manufacturing Intranet Portal

Modernization of critical SharePoint based enterprise software platform for improved employee productivity and collaboration

A large candy manufacturer from the United States relies on SharePoint for its employee collaboration initiatives. The purpose of this portal is to inform, train and educate employees. Being a business that creates high volume, creative products for children, the company relies heavily on new ideas and innovation fostered from within its employee and partner base to consistently bring new products to the market and stay a step ahead of competition. The SharePoint-based intranet portal was called New Product Initiative, or NPI. NPI allowed the employees to put up ideas for new products, which then went through various feasibility studies and approval cycles that involved other corporate teams including product, manufacturing, marketing and finance. While the company had a process for this communication, the adoption of the current portal by employees fell short of company’s expectations due to rigid legacy architecture and lack of streamlined process and automation. Lack of optimum integration points, performance issues and a subpar user experience caused inefficient usage and hurdles in collaboration between teams.

The Vatsa Solution: Improving performance and user experience of SharePoint based system
The company’s management wanted to modernize this business-critical application and approached Vatsa to perform a due diligence. The due diligence process surfaced key insights and bottlenecks related to the usability of the portal and workflows. It was decided that using the Microsoft environment was the most optimum because it utilized the existing infrastructure, had a great price-to-performance ratio and provided a robust roadmap with strong integrations for future enhancements. Vatsa used SharePoint designer and improved the overall portal experience by creating a new look and feel. As an important step and to address the key insights that had surfaced, Vatsa also redesigned the site navigation and user experience to introduce layers of activity that aligned with organizational goals and the innovation process, and created workflows for data collection and information validation that drove the product ideation process. These workflows provided review points and designated approval hierarchies as forms and other documents that traced an idea seamlessly from the beginning to its logical conclusion. Superior user experience, and seamless workflows with appropriate roles, alerts and reminders were the key highlights of the transformational improvements that Vatsa brought to the engagement.
Results:

The company has been in manufacturing business for nearly 100 years. With increasing pace of business and rising competition, introducing new product ideas continuously was identified as a critical differentiator for the company. Vatsa brought its full-stack expertise on Microsoft technologies to transform the existing portals and business processes with superior performance and user experience. This resulted in:

1) Vastly improved ideation process powered by automated workflows and seamless interworking of all SharePoint and NPI components
2) An order of magnitude improvement in employee adoption and usage of the new NPI system, with it becoming the primary source of communication for the entire innovation process
3) Adoption of NPI by the core product team for its own internal usage and innovation in addition to new ideas coming from employees at large, resulting in dramatically increased productivity of staff across the board
4) A robust system that is a durable competitive differentiator and core competency that is hard to replicate for others in the industry

Technology and Tools:

SharePoint Designer, SharePoint InfoPath Designer

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