Foundational “DNA” Innovation for Transformative Service DeliveryFor SAP SuccessFactors, world-class Human Capital Management services require a robust IT service management foundation from ServiceNow

The digital age is shining a light on the strategic importance of Human Capital Management (HCM) by ensuring that the right people are doing the right work at the right time and place. For many companies, delivering on those demands requires an HCM transformation. That can mean reshaping recruiting and onboarding, performance and compensation, the employee experience, and more.

As a cloud services company in the business of helping customers transform HCM to get the most out of their people, it is critical that your own internal systems provide exceptional support for your internal staff. That is why SAP SuccessFactors selected the Now Platform™ as the foundation on which to build IT operational excellence.

Success starts with rock-solid ITSMSuccessFactors is an SAP company that offers the world’s leading cloud-based HCM Suite. The company provides HCM services to more than 6,000 customers and 45+ million cloud application subscribers across more than 60 industries in over 177 countries.

Like every major enterprise with global operations, SAP SuccessFactors has experienced increasing complexity in its IT environment. In 2016, the company was growing quickly, merger and acquisition activity was proliferating, resulting in fragmented internal processes. Issues and service incidents were taking longer to identify and becoming more difficult to quickly resolve—impacting both internal employees and external customers. As part of their cFWD (cloud forward) initiative, SuccessFactors began the journey to transforming how they ran IT.

“We recognized that the status quo was not sustainable,” said Mike McGibbney, senior vice president of the company’s Service Delivery & Operations (SDO) organization. “If we wanted to support our clients in transforming HCM, we had to transform our own internal IT operations.”

“You could see the problem by looking at metrics like increasing MTTR (mean time to repair),” said Alex Hernandez, senior director of SDO service management. “Our MTTR had risen to roughly of four hours for Level 2 security incidents. Our executives didn’t have access to real-time metrics, and it was exhausting and time-consuming to try to explain to customers why a service was impacted.”

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Highlights

ServiceNow helps SAP SuccessFactors SDO implement an ITSM platform that is transforming service delivery, increasing operational excellence, generating cost savings, and keeping customers satisfied.

Challenges

• Proliferating and misaligned ITSM processes, resources, and tools were leading to higher service issues

• External customers were frustrated with service levels

• Internal staff dealing with more incidents and issues

Solutions

The Now Platform™

• Integration of processes, data, infrastructure, and workstreams across multiple sources

• Advanced dashboards to facilitate data-based decision-making

• Transparency and reporting on business process performance

ServiceNow Inspire ®

• Aligned business and IT objectives

• Expedited executive buy-in and advocacy

• Demonstrates the “Art of the Possible”

“We’re seeing the results, not just internally but also with our customers. They’re more confident than ever in our ability to deliver, which leads to more business and greater loyalty.”

— Mike McGibbney, Senior Vice President, Service Delivery and Operations (SDO)

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The SDO leadership saw that getting to the next level in service delivery would require a rock-solid ITSM foundation. “We were focused on four promises to our customers,” said Hernandez. “Increasing availability, speed, transparency, and maturity. The Now Platform gives us a way to ensure we are able to accomplish all of those goals while also making it easy for us to integrate existing tools and data. The value is in a single platform that unifies and streamlines our processes.”

The ServiceNow advantage? In a word: integrationThe Now Platform permitted SAP SuccessFactors SDO to modernize incident, change, problem, and configuration management, as well as customer impact and notification capabilities. More specifically, the platform allowed them to integrate and gain visibility into multiple processes, data sources, operational KPIs, and IT financial metrics. Now SDO leaders can see the “big picture” across multiple data sources and make better decisions about how to prioritize next steps in delivering cFWD cloud support for the digital enterprise.

“ServiceNow brought everything together and gave us much needed transparency with consolidated, data-specifc dashboards,” said Scott Ames, vice president of SDO Governance. “It integrates issue-tracking data and our monitoring tools into one unified view, which makes our operational governance and decision-making much easier and more accurate. It’s also allowed us to achieve our goal of a world-class ITIL maturity level of 3.0.”

Go-live and preliminary results in just 100 daysHaving selected the Now Platform, SAP SuccessFactors SDO set an aggressive implementation deadline for Phase 1 of implementation of just 100 days.

Working closely with the ServiceNow team, SDO rolled out Phase 1 across its operations in Budapest, Bangalore, Reston, and San Francisco, implementing complex application integrations across incident and change, customer notifications, and single sign on (Active Directory/LDAP). The team also developed a business service CMDB containing more than 1000 configuration items used to track and manage the incident, problem, and change processes while also developing over 300 service support groups across the 900+ internal SDO/SAP users. 

The ServiceNow team also assisted SDO with readiness and reskilling. The team delivered 32 different training sessions, including ITIL training, “Lunch and Learns”, and recorded audiovisual sessions to 1,300 users. Partnering with Accenture, the ServiceNow team implemented process workshops to provide flexibility for each process area while preserving organizational business rules. Weekly status calls with senior leaders from Accenture and SDO ensured speedy resource mobilization and alignment to eliminate issues.

Early results show a significant drop in MTTR for Level 2 severity incidents already with a 32% reduction from 4.06 hours in May 2017 to just 1.28 hours by August, 2017 with steady downward progress projected for the months ahead. In addition, ServiceNow calculated the following results based on SDO data:

• 2,435 FTE-hours per year saved in change creation

• 563 FTE-hours per year saved in incident creation

• $400,000 savings in the first six months of transformation

“We’re seeing the results, not just internally but also with our customers,” said Mike McGibbney, SVP, SDO. “They’re more confident than ever in our ability to deliver, which leads to more business and greater loyalty.”

“ServiceNow brought everything together and gave us much needed transparency with consolidated, data-specific dashboards.”

—Scott Ames, Vice President of SDO Governance

ServiceNow / 2servicenow.com

SAP SuccessFactors Case Study

ServiceNow Inspire engagement facilitates executive buy-in Every transformation vision requires executive advocacy and sponsorship, which is not always an easy task for an IT organization. It can be challenging to translate technological change into business value—and even more challenging to quantify the expected results in business terms to gain the necessary internal sponsorship and support.

To assist with that effort, SuccessFactors SDO senior executives engaged with ServiceNow Inspire, an executive advisory practice, to review their current plans and create a foward-thinking, strategic plan to continue to leverage ServiceNow capabilities. The Inspire team conducted a Business Value Workshop, which is a face-to-face meeting with business and IT leaders to not only show them what was possible, but also to calibrate the business potential and create a technology roadmap.

At the workshop, the Inspire team helped executives connect the company’s vision—enabling clients to get the most out of their human capital—to specific strategic drivers and business outcomes that ITSM transformation would contribute to and drive. For example, the Inspire team highlighted the connection between operational excellence and lower operational expenses, reduced risk, and higher productivity. Inspire also showed how these capabilities in turn led to business objectives such as increased customer confidence, accelerated innovation, and operational and service excellence.

These business outcomes were then tied directly to IT capabilities and initiatives and a strategic roadmap to focus on: eliminating service outages, using analytics to optimize performance, improving governance and compliance, and internal executive alignment. The Inspire team also linked the business goals to specific metrics for measuring success; such as MTTR, reduction of emergency changes, decrease in database service request cycle times, and decrease in operational costs.

The Inspire team helped executives and leaders visualize what was possible in terms of improving the user experience, the power of data and how to link specific views to internal and external customer communications. The team presented graphical examples of an enhanced look and feel for service requests, IT Service Health, and leveraging the full portfolio or operational dashboards in ServiceNow ® Performance Analytics for real-time decision-making.

“I admit it, I used to think of ServiceNow as a ticketing system. Now, I see ServiceNow as a key strategic partner.”

—Mike McGibbney, Senior Vice President, Service Delivery and Operations (SDO)

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Figure 1: SDO has seen a steady reduction (32%) in MTTR since the Now Platform was deployed.

May ’17

Average resolution time of resolved incidentsin hours > Priority = 2 - High/By month AVG+

Trend Forcast

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4

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4.06 4.12

2.28

1.28H

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June ’17 July ’17 Aug ’17 Sep ’17 Oct ’17 Nov ’17

SAP SuccessFactors Case Study

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The next step of the transformation journey is now underway with Phase 2 of the ServiceNow deployment, including implementation of additional ServiceNow modules such as the Service Catalog and Service Request Management, Release Management, Knowledge Management, and Extension of Business Service CMDB to Asset Level.

“I admit it—I used to think of ServiceNow as a ticketing system,” said Mike McGibbney. “Now, I see ServiceNow as a key strategic partner. The ServiceNow platform is transforming ITSM, and it’s capable of far more than that. We’re just scratching the surface of the business value it’s going to deliver for SAP SuccessFactors.”

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“The ServiceNow platform is transforming ITSM, and it’s capable of far more than that.”

—Mike McGibbney, Senior Vice President, Service Delivery and Operations (SDO)

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Figure 2: A simple interface provides senior leaders and IT operations executives with real-time information on service related issues.

Figure 3: An intuitive portal can help support staff get the information they need to solve issues fast and communicate better with clients.

SAP SuccessFactors Case Study

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