ServiceNow and SAP instance integration

Case Study SAP integration

ServiceNow and SAP instance integration

About client

Our client is the market leader in IT infrastructure for businesses and public-sector organizations in Europe’s Nordic and Baltic regions. The company offers a full range of hardware and software from the world’s top technology companies. With more than 7,500 employees located in 85 offices across seven countries.

Main goal: IT transformation

The lack of a common toolset and processes across the company became a pain point. The legacy system was too limiting, not to mention its configuration allowed for many process and master data deviations, creating the need for many workarounds and variants. This led to hampering swift growth and innovation, and it became a burden in terms of maintenance. The IT transformation brings a high level of process complexity, which means: different ways of working, data models and means for end-user interaction; extensive architecture rework and data consolidation; interdependencies between different integrations.

ServiceNow expertise needed

The project covers Sweden and was spread across the entire organisation. The main focus is on onboarding new tools – ServiceNow, replacing a legacy ITSM tool and SAP solution in the ecosystem. SPOC has been involved in this process to carefully analyse the difference between different business units and their ways of working and propose a unified model, streamlining as much as possible. Since there are 3 different teams involved in the integration process (ServiceNow, SAP and Azure), SPOC actively helps coordinate discussions and suggest a best practice approach. ServiceNow-related integrations are just a subset of the more extensive transformation, where more than 300 interfaces are being evaluated. The first step is to get to the right stakeholders and obtain any available documentation on the “as-is”. There is a solid need to minimise the impact on business. SPOC uses a lot of “show and tell” sessions, business process modelling sessions and workshops to understand the specifics of the stakeholders’ work and how to best support them on the platform.

Our perspective

Our engagement in the project was significant, with two PMs, one Architect, two Consultants and two developers. We worked with an agile approach with 2-weeks sprints but needed to conform to a more waterfall-based perspective. In such a complex and dynamic environment, frequent changes and process improvements are inevitable. Agile allows us to react and handle those very efficiently. 

Piotr Górnikiewicz

Senior Account Executive at SPOC

Senior Account Executive

Project’s phases 

We have mapped different phases of the project, from the exploration and realisation, through SIT, UAT & Trainings to going live. Currently, the project’s first phase is being implemented to onboard both new systems and their constellation of integrations. A lot of existing customizations are carefully evaluated for improvement. In a subsequent phase, a lot of focus will be placed on removing some of the customizations, further streamlining and introducing the Business Portfolio Management and CSDM. Possibly, some of the interfaces will also be consolidated to reduce complexity.  

Our goal is to:

Combine existing ServiceNow implementation with brand new SAP instance  

Ensure highly customized ServiceNow instance working for years already  

Onboard Sweden service streams into ServiceNow

Build a bunch of both SAP and non-SAP integrations   

Change the existing data model  

Engage a huge number of streams and stakeholders 

From Jira to ServiceNow – media company case

Case Study mass media case

From Jira to ServiceNow – media company case

About Customer

This project concerned an American multinational mass media factual television conglomerate. It was established in 1985 in New York, and right now, it operates in more than 220 countries with almost 10 000 employees. This company is a platform innovator, reaching viewers on all screens and services, from linear, free-to-air, and pay-TV channels to digital products and streaming services. The company covers all major and satellite markets, including Asia-Pacific; Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Latin America, owning many channels.

Main challenge: platform governance alignment

After the acquistion of the Polish companies, the company has been seeking to consolidate ITSM processes, tools, data, and teams, including Software Development, Release Management, CD/CI Integrations. The main goal was to migrate Polish IT support processes and teams to ServiceNow, including: Incident Management, Escalations Management, Request Fulfilment, Asset Management, CMDB, Change Management.

Project stages

The project has been divided into two streams. In the first stream, the scope was to lift and shift IT from Polish company support teams to ServiceNow in the fastest time possible. By lifting the main areas, the duality of tools and ways of working would end, ensuring the work uniformity. The first stream of Quick wins included:

  • Incident Management
  • Escalations (Problem Management, Major Incident Management
  • Knowledge Management – starting immediately in parallel with other streams
  • CMDB – Business Applications, covering much more than just Jira or ToyBox.

During the second stream, being a long-distance race, there was a focus on Asset Management, CMDB, and Change Management. The goal of this stage was to ensure asset and CMDB data correctness, embed Asset and CMDB processes and lift and shift Change Management with minimal disruption to Polish media company.

Our perspective

Marta Piotrowska

It was a very extensive and complex transformation project, not only in the technical aspect. This success wouldn’t have been possible without the partnership approach, mutual trust and very strong commitment of all the teams.

Marta Piotrowska

Project Manager at SPOC

Project Manager

ServiceNow benefits

Record visibility for Polish media company support teams regarding all incidents, requests & problems

Dedicated Catalog for Polish company users, not visible to the rest of the organization

Dedicated Incident form/s for incorporated company users or merging into existing Incident form/s

Successful delivery of numerous user trainings

Migration of ITSM processes from Jira into ServiceNow and integration with Salesforce

Catalog manager within Polish comapny with permissions to, e.g., create new catalog items, modify items, change catalog descriptions, manage categories

What does the client say?

I’m very happy with the development expertise and CMDB expertise. We’re on a journey, SPOC still is learning our company, and we learn SPOC. In terms of the journey, I’m pleased with the direction we’re going.


Vice President Global IT Service Management & Data Integrations

We really needed to have development expertise to build demand for enhancements to the platform. We needed a lot more people. We’ve used SPOC for business as usual enhancements since January 2019, and that’s gonna continue.


Software Development Director, Information Technology

PEPCO chooses ServiceNow

Pepco case study

PEPCO chooses ServiceNow

About PEPCO

PEPCO was founded in Poland over 20 years ago. Currently, the company has about two thousand stores in 14 markets – in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Great Britain, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Spain, and Italy. During six months until March 31, 2021, PEPCO achieved a 9% sales increase. Annually, the group opens about 300 new stores, planning further expansion of the European market. Every month stores are visited by as many as 20 million customers, served by 20,000 employees.

Main challenge: quick changes

Due to the company’s development and expansion into new markets, it turned out that the current IT system did not work properly. PEPCO needed a solution that would influence the stores’ modernization. The biggest challenge was the dynamic growth of the company and the lack of scalability of the existing tool. Therefore, the main goal of PEPCO was to implement the new solution as quickly as possible to report incidents effectively. The short time to implement the new tool – no more than 3 months – required an efficient action plan.

ServiceNow implementation process

PEPCO’s decision was based on the presented during the SPOC workshop possibilities of ServiceNow to address specific business and technical requirements – now and in the future. During the 3 months of the project, SPOC implemented Core Configuration, Service Catalog, Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, and Knowledge Management. After the go-live, SPOC provided PEPCO Hyper care, i.e. early live support. There were also training sessions on how to use ServiceNow. In addition to training, User Guides were created in cooperation with the internal team of PEPCO trainers.

After completing the first stage of the project, in October 2020, PEPCO employees were provided with a portal, also in a mobile version, for reporting IT-related problems. As a result of the PEPCO and SPOC’s joint work, the knowledge base, which used to be divided into two (for IT and end-users), has been unified into one, giving easy access to knowledge for all portal users.

During the project, SPOC modified Major Incident Management, a system for responding to the most urgent incidents involving many users, to restore the service to its original state and prevent such incidents from happening in the future. After the implemented change, the system was based on its independent architecture for sending text messages and organizing meetings. Integration with a custom SMS platform has been adapted to the client’s needs to avoid the standard SMS API solution – Twilio. There was also MS Teams and major incident integration.

Due to the characteristics of the retail industry, an essential part of the project was integration with Diebold-Nixdorf systems supporting devices such as cash registers, barcode readers and other equipment used directly at the selling points. Such equipment is used in all stationery stores. Therefore, its smooth work is crucial for sales continuity and, consequently, for maintaining financial liquidity. Thanks to the appropriate integration with the Diebold system, it has become possible to efficiently and quickly respond to hardware problems in the store. It meant that the reports were sent to Diebold-Nixdorf with all important information regarding the failure, which shortened its removal process. By sending a request through the Portal in ServiceNow, the store staff could perform these operations as quickly as possible thanks to the list of devices narrowed down to a given store and a well-thought-out path of completing the request, based on possible scenarios.

Our perspective

Marta Piotrowska

Working with PEPCO has brought us a lot of satisfaction due to the company’s dynamics and the willingness to take on new challenges. Thanks to our mutual commitment to implementing innovative technologies, we achieved success within just 3 months. We are convinced that ServiceNow, as a strategic platform, will support PEPCO in its further development.

Marta Piotrowska

Project Manager at SPOC

Project Manager

What distinguishes this project?

Time

Both sides were aware of the time pressure, and still, the agile approach and closing the first stage of the project in the planned 3 months was possible.

Scale

PEPCO reached new markets during the first implementation stage. It resulted in 14 different translations ​​of the portal for end-users in PEPCO stores across Europe.

ServiceNow benefits for PEPCO

Improved store infrastructure management – empowered automatically from Active Directory

Efficient problem reporting by stores

Basic functionalities available from the first day of implementation

Tool growth based on the company growth – scalability

Real-time reporting and dashboards

Strong support from the IT team

What does the client say?

SPOC specialists are ServiceNow professionals, famous for being trustworthy and for excellent customer recommendations. They guided us efficiently and proactively through the solution selection process. The head office of SPOC is located in Poznań, just like PEPCO. Thanks to this, we have a team of specialists “in place”, which is of great importance in the face of PEPCO’s dynamics and ambitious plans.


Łukasz Ziółkowski

Head of IT Services at PEPCO

Complex ITSM implementation for the top company from the pharmaceutical industry

Polpharma biologics

Complex ITSM implementation for the top company from the pharmaceutical industry

Leader of innovation

Polpharma Biologics is a relatively new and innovative company; however, being part of Polpharma, it has nearly a century of history. The company develops and manufactures biosimilar drugs in three sites in Poland and the Netherlands. With over 700 people and 10 000l bioreactor production capacity, it is one of the biggest biopharmaceutical companies in Europe. Polpharma Biologic, with its pipeline of novel biologics and biosimilars, is currently working on two innovative drugs and has seven molecules in the portfolio of biosimilar drugs.

Main challenge: fulfilling sector regulations

Polpharma Biologics needed an IT Service Management tool that is stable and fulfills strict pharmaceutical regulations. Introducing changes to an IT system has to follow a specific validation process, covering documenting the solution, defining an adequate level of testing, and providing evidence of performed tests. All those components need to allow full traceability. 

ServiceNow validation proces

To implement the ServiceNow ITSM, Polpharma Biologics chose SPOC as a partner. The main goal was to meet complex pharma industry-related validation and ensure high-quality, holistic testing and required documentation. After the scoping workshops, SPOC prepared a User Requirements Specification document as a key prerequisite for starting the design and delivery phase, launched after the first product workshop. It led to the delivery of all requirements, tests, and documents. SPOC provided the process owners and practitioners as well as the end-user community with the platform training. The SPOC PPM tool supported the creation of content of documents used in the validation process (FS, DS, CS), provided input to traceability matrix (RTM), and generated formal pieces of evidence in the testing process. Once validated, the ServiceNow ATF tool allowed regression testing to support Customer in platform upgrades, new ITSM modules implementation, or creating specialized business applications based on ServiceNow.rnrnThe first release covered platform’s Core Configuration, CMDB and Asset Management, Incident Management, Change Management, Service Portal and Service Catalogue, and Automated Tool Framework areas. The project ended successfully, and Polpharma Biologics is currently working with the ServiceNow platform, planning further developments.

Our perspective

Marta Piotrowska

Most of the challenges in the recently completed ServiceNow ITSM implementation resulted from validation requirements. It was successfully resolved thanks to the very close cooperation of team members, their analytical skills, and strong commitment from SPOC and Polpharma Biologics.

Marta Piotrowska

Senior Project Manager at SPOC

As a team we gained another great opportunity to deep dive into the pharma industry and its requirements when it comes to delivery of the project with all the other fundamental activities needed for the pharma business. We worked through it together tackling all the internal and external components to deliver products meeting all the stakeholder needs.

Karol Skałowski

Engineering Manager at SPOC

Senior Project Manager

Engineering Manager

What distinguishes this project?

Close cooperation

The project was challenging due to the specificity of the pharmaceutical industry and process validation. The key to success was analytical skills and strong commitment from both the SPOC team and Polpharma Biologics.

Solutions variety

The project covers various services like IT Service Management Products, Key processes synchronized via setting the respective workflows with the GxP process, PDF Generator (native SPOC app), Process Consultancy / Advisory.

ServiceNow benefits for Polpharma Biologic

One IT system that meets all the pharmaceutical industry requirements, like qualification process (IQOQ) and access to the ServiceNow CORE for Life Sciences (Compliance Operations Readiness Evidence) documentation

ITSM processes maturity automatically shifted up through the implementation of the platform getting best practices and automated workflows

Great base to evolve further enhanced by the respective piece of documentation as well as training

Regulatory and business needs reflecting in the platform

Built-in workflows and processes with high agility, flexibility and scalability

Structured and transparent framework for IT processes

What does the client say?

We play in the champions league, and we cannot afford uncertainty. The number of implementations of the ServiceNow platform globally was of great importance to us.


Bartłomiej Piernicki

Director Business Technology at Polpharma Biologics

For the first time for us, such an extensive IT system works entirely in a validated environment. This project equals accumulated experience, which we will use to end each implementation successfully in future IT projects.


Ireneusz Smoliński

IT Service Management & Application Manager at Polpharma Biologics

The SPOC company has gained our trust thanks to their knowledge. The design team consisted of people who knew the technology. SPOC employees have a passion for the development of the ServiceNow platform but also for working with people. We are committed to building partnership relations, and we have certainly succeeded.


Michał Kruszewski

IT Manager at Polpharma Biologics