Top Five Defense Contractor Achieves Speed and Scalability with ServiceNow
This Top Five American Defense Contractor has been at the forefront of defense innovation for over two decades, yet fast-growing and rapidly increasing sales exposed a lack of scalable, agile business processes within their organization. They needed an enterprise management platform that could support their expanding business and its customers’ growing need for continued product maintenance.
The uncertainty of 2020 has forced advanced manufacturing companies like this one to align their business processes to move faster, create consistency, and establish a common customer journey for all. Remaining nimble yet consistent through accelerated business processes is essential, especially for firms that must adhere to strict government regulations and contracts.
Expanding Lines of Business Emphasize the Need for a Unified Customer Experience
This enterprise not only sells state-of-the-art equipment, but they also provide support for their products post-purchase through contractual agreements. Historically, many different products mean many different support teams, with each team delivering customer support in a siloed way. To further complicate matters, teams used ServiceNow in different ways, at varying maturity levels, and for different functions for each of their product offerings.
The need to reduce customer response time, improve the customer experience (CX), and curtail rising costs for support and maintenance as their business expanded spurred the defense contractor into action. Treating their customers with empathy was crucial. They knew they needed a single, unified vision of CSM to simplify and standardize their CX and reduce confusion and drive efficiency for employees and customers alike.
Building a more effective customer service solution would not only help deliver a great CX, it would also decrease the cost associated with providing long-term maintenance for their products and equipment by increasing efficiency and boosting employee productivity by making their jobs easier.
Searching for the Right Partner
As the company continued to onboard additional Lines of Business (LOBs), risks around technology investment, efficiency, and scalability increased. Already using the platform across various product groups, the defense contractor knew that ServiceNow could be the enterprise-wide Service Management solution they were seeking.
The platform’s ability to break down organizational siloes, centralize processes, and organize customer and product information into one single version of the truth would be critical to adding additional LOBs in the future. Knowing this, the company set out to find a partner who could help them create the best tailored strategy for the ServiceNow platform.
Driving Business Value with a Unified Approach
The organization found that partner in Acorio. The Acorio team knew they needed to craft a support model that would remain as common as possible yet allow for any critical variations required for specific products or customers. To achieve this, Acorio’s Advisory team reviewed the way the company’s many product groups delivered customer support, parsed out common denominators, and envisioned how a universal approach to customer support could be created.
The project team focused on setting up the defense contractor to accelerate with confidence and sustain that growth over time. They asked, “what does the organization need to look like in order to drive business value?” and developed a tailored ServiceNow Roadmap that takes advantage of the right part of the platform at the right time.
Armed for the Future with a ServiceNow Roadmap
Acorio’s Advisory team took a tailored approach that assessed the company’s functional requirements and processes, identified the most effective framework for customer support in the future, and then delivered a strategy to execute this vision. Moving forward, the defense contractor now has a concrete ServiceNow Roadmap that will align and optimize its Service Operating model. The Acorio team:
- Conducted a holistic assessment of the organization’s current processes to determine the proper path forward, harmonizing and standardizing processes across LOBs and allowing for future expansion
- Provided a target operating model and detailed Roadmap based on business need that will drive process and platform consistency
Next on the roster for this client? Building and deploying ServiceNow’s CSM solution with the help of Acorio – the first step in their long-term ServiceNow roadmap that will drive scalability by integrating all LOBs into a single Service Management instance.
More on the Horizon
Key takeaways for companies looking to start their ServiceNow journey:
- Challenge the status quo: Evaluate your current business processes and structures to see what is working and what needs to improve. Rather than settling on a traditional process because it’s “the way it’s always been done,” define a vision of your target operating state and then work back from there.
- Have empathy for the customer: Center your solution around the needs of your customers. No one wants to navigate multiple programs and support models for different purchases made with the same company. Your customers expect a consistent and delightful experience across all LOBs.
- Standardize your processes at an enterprise level: Taking time to step back and define an enterprise-level Service Operating model rather than attempting a piecemeal digital transformation will make maintaining agility and speed easier in the long run. This project is a clear example of the ROI for this strategy.
By leveraging ServiceNow to automate tasks and integrating multiple systems to drive employee productivity and operational excellence, the defense contractor is projected to save an estimated $77 million over the next five years.
With the help of Acorio, the organization saw what was possible with the ServiceNow platform. Now armed with a Roadmap that’s already producing tangible results, the organization is eager to expand its ServiceNow footprint across departments, trusting Acorio to carry out two subsequent projects with more on the horizon.
