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Global Medical Company Brings its ITSM Instance into the Future Using ServiceNow

This medical company has over 70 years of experience specializing and innovating in vision and eye care products. Serving customers in more than 140 countries, this global organization also has a diverse pool of thousands of employees throughout the world. Years of cutting-edge technology and industry firsts helped this organization grow to become the $7 billion business it is today.

Ten years after their acquisition by an international pharmaceutical company, this medical organization was ready to separate from its parent company and realize their two-year plan to open and independently operate 150+ global sites.

To become a standalone organization and move forward with their newfound autonomy, they needed to develop their own internal IT infrastructure, ultimately looking at ServiceNow’s ITSM solution to help them track their transition, while under a strict timeline and regulatory requirements.

Creating a New Organization with a Strong Foundation

Moving away from their parent company, this pharma organization was eager to gain its independence. They were on the bleeding edge of defining their organization, designing an entirely new business from scratch, which included creating a new framework for converting and onboarding services into their own environment. For them, gaining their independence quickly was more important than over-engineering from the start. They understood to be able to meet their deadline of moving away from their parent organization, their system and processes would be built with the underlying belief they were made to grow and continuously improve. ServiceNow was uniquely poised to serve as the enterprise-wide platform upon which they would build their solution. They knew that the platform could be expanded to multiple organizations within the company and help reduce their future application footprint and requirements for multiple groups.

Not only faced with a tight timeline to get its own ITSM instance up and running, the organization also had strict government and industry regulations to adhere to. Being a pharmaceutical company, the project had to meet strict federal regulations and documentation requirements including traceability and formal testing of all changes made to the ServiceNow ITSM environment.

Starting from, essentially, scratch, the company knew that the closer they could stay to out-of-the-box (OOTB) with a new implementation, the easier it would be to scale and achieve their growth ambitions. Beyond that, they recognized the transformative power of the platform and how it could be used outside of the IT department. They knew the platform would give them the capabilities they needed to remain agile and build resiliency as they find their footing as an independent entity in an industry rife with change.

Enlisting Acorio as a True Partner

As the first order of business, the Acorio team completed an Advisory project in which they evaluated the company’s ITSM instance, their immediate needs, and how to proceed. The Acorio team knew they needed to satisfy all of the company’s immediate requirements to make the separation as smooth as possible, but also recognized that their ITSM operations needed to be configured in a way that would be efficient and scalable for the future, especially with the company’s expansion goal of 150 new sites over the next 2 years. 

Acorio identified over 80 Services across HR, Finance, and Procurement functions and defined and prioritized which services were required to move forward with the company’s separation. The solution provided ways to leverage what they found during the Blueprint phase that enabled the company to:

  • Leverage ServiceNow to help the functions provide customers with a better experience
  • Help Practitioners and Fulfillers with a more efficient way to provide their services
  • Move forward via a comprehensive Roadmap, approved by IT and the business to reduce risk and accelerate their implementation
  • Provide the foundation for complete Global Business Services

Embracing the art and value of simplicity was crucial – the pharmaceutical company was already tasked with a huge number of duties to ensure the separation went as smoothly as possible Acorio recognized that overcomplicating the project in this already stressful environment would mean an unsuccessful implementation. The biopharma’s employees were already working overtime to meet tight deadlines and ensure the continued health of the entire organization. The Acorio team joined them as a true partner, not just a “plus one,” and worked right alongside them to guarantee the success of the project.

Crawling, Walking, then Running to a New ITSM Environment

Acorio and the pharma agreed on using Acorio’s “Crawl, Walk, Run” methodology to ensure quick wins and a faster separation from their parent company’s instance. They also focused on the MVP, Minimum Viable Product. Looking forward to their GxP nature and documentation requirements, anything that wasn’t out-of-the-box would require additional testing on their end, of which they were looking to reduce overhead if possible, especially considering quarterly patch requirements and upgrades.

The team had to think not only about the immediate project and getting them onto their own ITSM instance, but also on what continuing maintenance would cost to ensure scalability for the future, thinking in terms of both finances and human effort. Because ServiceNow does their own quarterly patching and upgrades testing, the company knew that staying OOTB would guarantee a scalable, maintainable solution.

Emerging Prepared with a New ITSM Instance

The company’s new ITSM rollout left them with a fully developed and functional instance that provides visibility, increases efficiency and security, and serves as a foundation for their expansion ambitions. The project’s key objectives were achieved, including:

  • ITSM implementation in the production-validated environment and an established framework for converting and onboarding services into the organization’s new environments.
  • Enablement of the client admins, functional roles, and end-users.
  • Established a framework for future expansion and updates for the ServiceNow platform.

Solutions provided:

  • Core Configuration Scope
  • Incident Management
  • Major Incident Management
  • Security Incident Response
  • Problem Management
  • Change Management
  • Request Management (Service Catalog)
  • Knowledge Management
  • Service Portal
  • Discovery
  • Configuration Management
  • Hardware Asset Management

Navigating What Lies Ahead

The biopharma now has the basis of a comprehensive ITSM environment suitable for a major corporation. This environment meets the regulatory requirements and will be used for years to come as they roll out the use of this environment across their many locations nationwide. They have the agility that will be crucial for them to navigate changes in the life sciences industry through 2020 and beyond.

The organization is extremely happy with the final product and has signed onto additional contracts with Acorio, trusting the team to continue to partner with them to further develop their ServiceNow instance well into the future. Up next on the shortlist: enabling Finance and Procurement Service Management in the company’s ServiceNow instance.