The Digital Enterprise Series – Part I – Business & Shared Services Use Cases

[lionelberger]

Introduction

As I meet with ServiceNow customers, I’m often asked three strategic questions:

• What are the use cases the platform can support for business/shared services?
• How should I get started?
• What are the best practices you recommend?

With this series of articles, I will provide some concrete and pragmatic thoughts around these questions. These articles are not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive but should help approach the digitization of business services. They are neither meant to be theoretical nor academic; they are mainly based on my own experience and what I am seeing with customers. 

I do hope you will react, comment, agree or disagree using the comment feature at the bottom, so this article can evolve and improve based on your feedback!

Typical Business Services Use Cases

ServiceNow was founded on a very simple idea: work should be easier. Getting simple work done shouldn’t be so hard and complex—work should be manageable! We started with IT by creating a System of Action to streamline and automate unstructured work, eliminating the back-and-forth emails, phone calls, and manual processes that waste time & money and sap productivity.

Today, the entire enterprise—HR, finance, facilities, procurement, customer service and beyond—can benefit from the power of the platform to create a better experience for employees, customers and suppliers. The platform can transform the way work is done.

While many use cases will be industry or company specific, there are a number of typical use cases that are great candidates for simplification, standardization, and automation:

Human Resources / Employee Experience / Hire to Retire

Predefined Services: Managing the lifecycle of employees, interns, trainees, and contractors: Pre-boarding, onboarding, move, expatriation, marriage, divorce, birth, death, promotion, demotion, offboarding, retirement, post-retirement, and cross-systems employee master data updates. Other examples include modification of bank account details, pension plan enrollment, leave of absence, travel & expense services, associated approvals and integration with travel agency services and T&E solutions, and handling of employee credit cards.

Unexpected Requests: Questions and issues related to the aforementioned predefined services, questions and issues around pension plans, insurance, holidays, absences, training & conference attendance, travel & expenses.

Procurement / Purchase to Pay / Source to Pay

Predefined Services: E2E purchase to pay orchestration, vendor onboarding/offboarding, vendor master data updates; RFI/RFP orchestration, NDA creation, contract creation/modification; vendor lifecycle, vendor/supplier performance review, vendor risk assessment and management.

Unexpected Requests: Questions and issues related to the aforementioned predefined services, or questions and issues regarding a particular vendor, contract, invoice, etc.

Facilities / General Services / Smart Campus

Predefined Services: Facilities & security services related to employee onboarding / transition / offboarding (per above HR section). Maintenance of buildings, equipment, rooms, furniture, extinguishers, sensors, integration with IoT devices to automate some of the maintenance actions and requests (e.g. smart trash bin); canteen, catering and restaurant services, publication of the week’s menu; visitors, guests and security services; organization of events, conferences and townhalls; management and maintenance of the company’s fleet of cars.

Unexpected Requests: Questions and issues related to the aforementioned predefined services, or regarding a room, building, campus, furniture, etc.

Finance / Costing / Record to Report

Predefined Services: Orchestration of financial period end closing activities across the businesses, countries and regions; request ad-hoc financial report, handle credit card dispute.

Unexpected Requests: Questions and issues related to the aforementioned predefined services, or regarding reporting & control, accounts payable/receivable, credit cards, tax and compliance. Questions and issues related to Material Management and Invoice disputes (as part of Order to Cash and Source to Pay).

Master Data Management

Predefined Services: Expose Master Data Mgmt Services provided to the enterprise, orchestration of activities and approvals required across departments and systems to create, edit or enrich master data, etc.

Unexpected Requests: Questions and issues related to the aforementioned predefined services, master data errors and quality issues, master data compliance issues, etc.

Customer Service / Customer Support / Post-sale Support

Predefined Services: Customer onboarding/offboarding, customer master data management, modify a customer order/delivery (shipping address, delivery date, etc.); provide a copy of invoice or contract; expose services offered to customer (industry specific), e.g. arrange a visit/maintenance, handle a warranty case, provide training or support for a product, etc.

Unexpected Requests: Questions and issues related to orders, invoices, contracts, products and services.

Pharma specific: Digital Clinical trials process & services, Digital Patient and Health Care Professionals services
Automotive: Mass recall of specific model(s) for safety fix/check
Tech/Media/Telco: Subscription to a new service/software/solution
All industries – GDPR: Request right to be forgotten

IoT, Smart Devices, Connected Devices

More and more services are going to be consumed by machines/robots/devices rather than humans. In such situations, IoT devices will be able to directly connect to the system of action to generate a task, action or workflow that may be assigned to a human or automated. Some examples:

• Maintenance: Smart extinguisher has reached the periodic check period, smart light has reached end of life, etc.
• Repair: Smart industrial asset at production plant is encountering an anomaly
• Check: Smart sensor in campus building is measuring increasing temperatures, smart lighting system is reporting a low light intensity
• Refill: Smart popcorn machine at theme park is running out of raw material, smart fuel tank is reaching a low threshold, etc.

Shared Service Centers and Business Process Outsourcing

When putting in place a Shared Service Center, whether internal or outsourced, it is critical to define what services will be provided, who they will be offered to, and what service levels will be required. Shared Service Centers will typically support a subset of the services listed in the previous sections. Some of those services will be part of a number of other services that must be orchestrated to deliver an end-to-end experience to the requestor (e.g. purchasing and paying for goods or onboarding an employee), so it is important to consider the big picture and understand the exhaustive list of services and how they interact and interdepend on each other. The next article about Enterprise Service Management provides some insights and recommendations on this topic.

Conclusion

The picture below shows a simple framework that can be used to define which use cases apply to the intersection of service domains with platform capabilities. Make it your own to clarify and communicate about your digital transformation, with a focus on users and common denominators. And do not hesitate to share your own Digital Services Capability Map by commenting this article.

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Next chapter: The Digital Enterprise Series – Part II – Enterprise Service Management

Related articles:

- The Employee Digital Workplace

- Is your Order to Cash process lean?