ServiceNow Advisory Services After Two Purpose-Driven Companies Merge to Form Fortune500 Transportation Logistics Powerhouse

When this transportation and logistics company absorbed a subsidiary of a larger North American company, it effectively doubled its workforce overnight. Headquartered on the East Coast of the United States, the company has a long track record of driving safety, innovation, and efficiency in the transportation industry. Now with over 100 manufacturing plants, service centers, and sales offices in over 50 countries, they needed to undergo a strategic digital transformation to make the acquisition as smooth as possible.

The original company was more of a traditional manufacturing and logistics company while its new acquisition prided itself on innovation and reliability. This new acquisition offered an opportunity to further digitalize themselves and breathe new life into the organization by bringing in a new digital point of view. Both organizations were already using the ServiceNow platform, however, each had its own level of usage, user adoption, and maturity. Together, the new team hoped to;

• Unify ITSM processes across the two companies to streamline workflows under a single ServiceNow instance
• Set up and populate CMDB with SN Discovery and API Incident to ensure current and accurate data
• Create a shared IT Portal with one point of entry into IT across the enterprise
• Define and configure reports and dashboards establishing SLAs and KPIs for the new ITSM processes

The first order of business was to cut down on legacy processes to streamline operations and save money. They hoped to end the drain on finances and human energy needed to maintain disparate systems and unite them under one ServiceNow instance.

The new organization ran into a common problem: heavy customization across multiple instances and Portals, which lead them further and further from OOTB that it became nearly impossible to tell what was what. These systems had become increasingly hard to maintain and upgrade with each new customization.

Because of their outdated more “traditional” operating model, the Acorio team dedicated time to offering Advisory services and helping the organization build a custom roadmap to get their ServiceNow instance back on track.

Building Off of Strategic ServiceNow Advisory

Acorio spent time researching what the company’s essential processes were and the areas that needed to be addressed by the upgrade. By evaluating each disparate instance and seeing where they could come together, what they could change, learn from, tweak, the Acorio team was able to put together the best ServiceNow roadmap for the organization’s needs.

Additionally, the new organization needed fast solutions and Acorio worked intensively with them to make sure that the new roadmap could be implemented fast. The acquired company had a hard exit date from its parent company and needed to execute that with no flexibility.

The final project plan included all of the essential requirements and functions that the Advisory team had come up to ensure that the merger went smoothly, with no additional overhead so that cost would be kept low and complications would be at a minimum during the overall merging of companies.

In addition to the Advisory and technical services, Acorio worked with the new organization’s team on Change Management coaching. Continued Organizational Change Management (OCM) was essential to ensure that users from both companies understood the ongoing changes to the ServiceNow environment and saw the benefit of the merger.

Looking Ahead

Acorio’s Advisory Services took center stage in this project as the organization needed guidance on how best to absorb this structurally different company that was on its own ServiceNow instance. The threat of that hard exit date was looming, and they needed to transform, fast, rather than build on more customizations to their existing solutions.

With the new instance and Portal, the newly formed organization saw an increase in self-service, cutting down on resolution times, freeing up resources, and meeting the goal of major cost-cutting.

Now that the initial merger is over, the organization is ready to take their newly revamped platform and use it for their continued, broader Digital Transformation strategy.