Leading Wealth Management Business Adopts ServiceNow Supply Chain Management

Challenge

Like many organisations, our customer was running an essential element of their procurement operations on a legacy siloed system, built on old technology and designed for a less complex operating environment.  They were keen to take advantage of the ServiceNow Supply Chain Management workflows and the broader platform automation and integration capability.  The challenge was to integrate Contract Management into the wider IT and business processes and improve the interoperability of procurement with finance and service management functions to support enterprise operational resilience.

Due to the increased reliance on external vendors and service suppliers, the organisation was keen to improve effective communication, especially during critical events.

The Solution and Delivery 

The Group CTO engaged KA2 based on the recommendation of another KA2 customer in the financial services sector.  As an existing user of ServiceNow ITSM, he was keen to understand how the business could exploit the platforms broader capability and sought KA2’s advice on the platform suitability to meet the Supply Chain Services use case.  Following several discussions, it was clear that the ServiceNow Contract Management module would meet the bank’s essential requirements and deliver additional benefits.  Using the Now platform as the central contract repository and management tool would enable integration to other processes and workflows and build a solid foundation to strengthen operational resilience on a continual basis.

Working in partnership with the Supply Chain Service team and Group CTO, there were apparent process issues that needed resolving. The areas identified included;

• Missing or irrelevant data.
• Lack of standardisation for contract entry and management.
• Heavy reliance on manual actions, leading to poor communication and late or missed deadlines
• The need to enter the same data multiple times, impacting productivity and critical services
• Lack of business ownership of contracts

Acting as the agile ServiceNow Specialist Partner, we worked alongside the bank’s ServiceNow offshore BAU Partner to deliver the solution, including the vital testing and release phases.  Our mantra is ‘out the box’ with zero customisation, and we challenged the France-based Supply Chain Services stakeholders to review current processes and adopt the platform workflows with minimal configuration.

As a result, the solution standardises and automates the contract management lifecycles, covers all contract types, handles numerous currencies, provides role-based access/security to sensitive contracts, supports business stakeholder ownership and integrates the single source of contract data with other processes, including incident tickets.

Using the KA2 Smarter Framework, our agile delivery methodology, the implementation of Contract Management, including the import and cleansing of all contract data from the legacy system, was completed in under five weeks. The successful project was awarded a 5-star ServiceNow Customer Satisfaction Score by the key SCS stakeholder.

The Benefits

• Moving to the market-leading workflow management platform enables the adoption of continually enhanced working practices not possible on the legacy system.
• Contracts can be onboarded more quickly and efficiently and follow the RACI approval workflow for business stakeholders.
• Improved reporting and MI around contract values, expiry dates and renewal processes.
• Contracts remain relevant and accurate in the platform.
• Integration to ITIL based processes have improved the incident, change and release lifecycles.
• Enables the organisation to meet operational resilience obligations through a centralised view of the vendor asset and service contracts underpinning business services.

The centralised repository enables the straightforward amendment of contracts.