Highlights
The company is using ServiceNow’s CMDB with the help of Discovery Application for managing all the Configuration Items within their Organization.
Organization: Limited Liability Company.
Business: The company is a chain of retail stores, offering cosmetics, healthcare items, household products and health food and drinks.
Workforce: 66.076.
Country: Germany.
About the company:
As a ServiceNow customer, the company wanted to consolidate their CMDB management into a single system. Additionally, they wanted to integrate Discovery for the detection of new CI or enrich the CMDB by keeping it up to date and automate the connection of all ITSM Processes.
Project Approach:
We provided the business process, and technical consulting expertise to help the client set up a management plan for the infrastructure/CMDB starting with the implementation of Discovery.
Together with the customer’s IT Operations Management team, IT Service Management team, platform team, and other subject matter experts, we were able to deliver the following:
Implementation of Discovery.
Enrichment of the CMDB.
Implementation of ITSM.
Enrich and automate the Service Catalog.
Improve data foundation.
Improve Dashboards and Reporting.
Improve manual assignment.
Create a foundation in the CMDB for future projects.
Definition of schedules for on-premises and cloud networks by geographic location or IP ranges.
Business challenges:
CMDB has not been acknowledged as a continuous process and the company had no clear goals for their configuration management process and CMDB. Furthermore, the company was missing a strategy to effectively maintain their CMDB, which led to inaccuracies.
Using multiple date sources led to big issues since each of the different data sources needed an integration, which led to an inefficient work process.
Having an inaccurate CMDB was causing issues throughout the whole platform.
With several Web Services in place, a high number of resources was needed to maintain them, and the customer was facing unplanned outages resulting in huge costs.
For IT to gain visibility, the IT department of the company Organization was facing the challenge of consolidating, maintaining, and understanding complex configuration data.
The company was trying to reduce the number of Web Services in use and have everything within one Platform.
Huge load of work is being done manually and there is a lack of a solid automation plan.
Multiple disparate processes, tools, and vendors with overlying functions.
The company had acquired too many different IT tools and were unable to manage them independently.
Collaboration between different IT tools e.g., Incident Management and Problem Management was not efficient, and a lot of the processes were done manually.
Proactively detect root cause of the incidents and find a solution if the same incident is occurring multiple times.
Project Success:
Using Discovery did provide a higher visibility and insight into the network and the core software relationships.
Discovery provides the foundation for the Service Mapping.
An up-to-date CMDB allowed to enrich the database to create more accurate Reports and Dashboards and thereby a better visibility throughout the whole platform.
Credential affinity method increased Discovery performance.
Robust configuration management did highly reduce unplanned outage costs.
Recognizing patterns and probes to get more accurate CMDB data to gain profound insight into the business system.
Creating automated processes, which activate Discovery on a regular basis to compare new found devices with Configuration Items. If no match is founded, Discovery will create a new Configuration Item within the company CMDB.
Automated assignment is more accurate throughout the whole platform, since the CMDB is more accurate than before.
Through various automated processes we were able to keep the CMDB up-to-date.
Create a foundation in the CMDB for future projects.
Expenses for the maintenance of various data sources could been saved due the reduction to the single platform SN.
Using the ServiceNow Service Catalog, employees now have access to more Items inside a centralized portal. The portal is now capable of handling a lot more requests per day, mostly initiated by automated processes.
Speeding up the “Detection” to “Resolution” Lifecycle of ITSM processes through automated logic and workflows.
Interconnection of all the related IT Service Management Applications, to make the understanding of the issues much easier.
