A business of Compass Group PLC, Compass Group Australia provides food and support services to clients in industries such as defence, offshore and remote regions, hospitals and senior living, education and sport and leisure. In Australia, the business provides 65 million meals and sells 10 million cups of coffee per year, using $200 million worth of locally sourced products. More than 11,000 employees operate across 700 locations within seven operating brands: ESS; Eurest; medirest; Chartwells; Restaurant Associates; Delta FM; and Omega Security Services.
For several years, Compass Group Australia had operated an IT service management tool from a virtualisation vendor. However, the tool had reached end-of-life and the vendor was no longer maintaining or providing support services. This situation prompted Compass Group Australia to review its options with a view to improving IT service management within the business, and exploring opportunities to extend service management from IT into business processes.
Ability to Extend Beyond ITSM Crucial to Product Selection
“We started by reviewing the products available in the market and naturally included ServiceNow as a leading vendor in IT service management,” says Darren Shearsby, General Manager Enterprise Architecture and IT Security, Compass Group PLC. “We found that a number of the pure-play IT service management tools were quite expensive and could not be extended into other processes. We ended up shortlisting ServiceNow and one other product. “As part of that process, I went to the ServiceNow NowForum in 2015 and was so impressed by the vision for the business and roadmap for its products that we all but decided to implement ServiceNow in Compass Group Australia. From there we developed a case extending service management from IT into supply chain and finance processes to convince our board that this is the tool we should use.”
A Single Source of Truth
Shearsby and his team won board approval and started the project. “We started with IT service management and created an internal IT support portal for employees called MyService,” he says. “We deployed the ServiceNow incident, change and discovery modules, and these helped us establish a single source of truth about our IT assets.”
Business Value
Applying rigour to CAPEX: The Compass Group Australia IT team also wanted to provide the business with an early justification for its support. According to Shearsby, CAPEX spending was an opportunity to leverage the organisation’s lean process approach. “We had a good understanding how this approach would enhance the agility of operations, supply chain and finance,” he says. “So we started using ServiceNow to reduce CAPEX approval timelines, monitor compliance with our local approval manual and create an audit trail.”
Implementing IT service management with ServiceNow has also helped Shearsby forge a culture of compliance with workflows and processes. “You can have the best systems in the world, but if people aren’t raising tickets, systems aren’t going to fix that,” he says. “Because we now have a single source of truth and ServiceNow has made processes easy to follow, team members are now more likely to log incidents appropriately.”
Metrics and Next Steps
Service measurement – ServiceNow has given the Compass Group Australia service manager greater visibility of incident locations and volumes, and how long incidents typically take to resolve, enabling him to quickly identify and rectify problems. “Due in part to ServiceNow, we’ve seen a 20 percent drop in the number of open tickets over the last few months,” Shearsby says.
The average age of service tickets is down to around five days compared to more than 20 days prior to the deployment of ServiceNow. “Culturally, there is now an increased drive within Compass Group Australia to log and respond according to service level agreements,” Shearsby adds.
Other business units are now leveraging the tool for service management. The supply chain and human resources functions are using ticket management to manage workloads, prioritise incidents and control queues.
Faster integration – Compass Group Australia’s Western Australian operation has used Service Now’s professional services arm to undertake a complex integration with a facilities management tool and a third party, and Shearsby says the team has completed the project twice as quickly as another vendor they had used. “This delivered an enormous benefit. When you are an IT team working with an internal business, you can be accused of being too slow to react or deliver,” he says. “When you can be agile, it builds trust from the business in IT’s ability to deliver.”
Using ServiceNow in Compass Group Australia to streamline IT service management and certain business processes has won attention from other teams within the business. “There have been various points where we’ve been asked whether ServiceNow has a particular capability, and we’ve invited the account team in to demonstrate a particular module, or a particular function, and how it can be customised to meet specific requirements,” Shearsby says.
One area the business is considering deploying ServiceNow for is legal request management. “As IT engages different parts of the business it is clear the fundamentals of service management employed by IT for years are applicable elsewhere,” Shearsby says. “Everyone needs to manage work such as business as usual work or service requests and legal were no different.
“The main benefit is using the system to automate the process of team members asking for legal services and being allocated the right resources to resolve their issue or request for service” Shearsby adds. “So the system would collect the appropriate information up-front and transfer it to the legal team, and capture any additional information as required. He sees Compass Group Australia’s engagement with ServiceNow as about delivering improved agility and enabling the business to focus on delivering customer service.
“We want IT and the business to spend less time on ‘run’ and ‘more time on ‘change’,” Shearsby says. “We can release people from administration or repetitive tasks and enable them to focus on great service and ‘great results’ which supports our core principles.”
