CASE STUDY

Situation

A leading manufacturer of household appliances with a global workforce of 93,000 was looking to modernize and streamline its IT asset management (ITAM) operations. This Fortune 500 company has relationships with dozens of vendors that are involved in procuring, servicing, maintaining, and supporting a wide variety of IT assets, ranging from software licenses to laptops to tablets. The vendors are instructed to send documentation of all of their ITAM-related activities to the company. An internal ITAM staff then imports the records manually into the company’s ServiceNow system and performs data quality checks by hand.

As a result of these non-automated processes, the company’s ITAM team was spending inordinate amounts of time on basic data entry and data checking. For some team members, these tasks took up the majority of their workday. However, because the company’s ServiceNow system had not been configured to optimize management of ITAM vendor records, the company had no other option for maintaining up-to-date information on its millions of individual IT assets. Crossfuze, for example, counted 5.5 million records of individual software installations, plus updates for about 30,000 computers; these are just the assets being maintained by the company’s North America division!

Crossfuze was brought to rapidly and systematically transform how the company imports and verifies the quality of all of its ITAM vendor data. The ITAM consultant that selected Crossfuze for this subcontracted work trusted Crossfuze to deliver a customized, scalable solution that would extend the power of the company’s existing ServiceNow platform. In fact, the consultant hand-picked Crossfuze for this work, as Crossfuze had completed prior subcontracted work for this consultant—with great success. Thus, the consultant felt confident Crossfuze would deliver the quality of work and specialized expertise that was required of this job.

Process/Solution

Crossfuze began by meeting with the client’s ITAM team, which was assembled to help Crossfuze design and roll out a customized ServiceNow automation. Crossfuze guided the ITAM team through a series of complex planning and visioning phases. Most members of the client’s ITAM team were new to their positions and had little experience with this type of implementation; additionally, the ITAM team underwent numerous personnel changes over the course of this process.

Crossfuze focused on understanding how ITAM vendors supply records to the company, what data validation and import steps the ITAM staff were taking at the time, and where bottlenecks and errors were most commonly impeding productivity and high-quality record-keeping. Given that each vendor uses proprietary formats and nomenclature when supplying vendor data, Crossfuze also focused on developing a solution that could be adapted to work across all of the company’s diverse ITAM vendors.

Result

Crossfuze developed a customized ServiceNow configuration that allowed the company to unlock powerful new functionalities within the existing platform. The company’s ITAM team can now engage in centralized management of global IT assets, with everyone from a financial auditor to an IT repair technician able to access complete, up-to-date lifecycle information for individual assets and groups of assets. Furthermore, the company has access to a holistic, global overview of its IT assets, and an unprecedented opportunity to run customized analyses that provide deeper insights and drive greater ITAM efficiencies.

The ITAM staff members that were tasked with manual data entry and checking, meanwhile, have had their workloads considerably lightened. No longer must they spend hours manually analyzing vendor data to identify and resolve discrepancies and other problems, including assets that have not been received or for which tracking information is incorrect. With the company’s Crossfuze-designed automation, ServiceNow automatically analyzes vendor data and produces an exceptions log for easy, focused follow-up. Crossfuze also helped the company understand how to ask its vendors to tweak and modify how they send their data to the company so that the records become even easier for the company’s ITAM staff to validate and import into ServiceNow.

Highlights

Client Profile

• Multinational corporation with $21 billion in annual sales
• Leading manufacturer and marketer of household appliances
• About 93,000 employees across 70 manufacturing and technology research centers

Main Goals

• Modernize and streamline global IT Asset Management (ITAM)
• Enable data from dozens of vendors to be automatically imported to ServiceNow
• Check data quality automatically and flag exceptions

Crossfuze’s Approach

• Facilitated visioning and planning meetings with diverse ITAM stakeholders
• Designed a solution that can be incrementally expanded to encompass more vendor data
• Configured the company’s existing ServiceNow system and rolled out technical documentation

Outcomes

• Dramatically reduced time spent on manual data entry and data validation
• Centralized management of ITAM records for both hardware and software assets
• Enabled internal staff resources to be reassigned to higher-value tasks