Wherever They Go, It’s All About Flow

ServiceNow is bringing their trailblazing technology to the manufacturing sector

Since its founding in 2004, ServiceNow has been redefining the way we work. Their pioneering solutions for CX, employee experience, operational excellence and hyperautomation have changed the way we communicate, innovate, and create value. Eighty-five percent of the Fortune 500 have digitized their workflows with ServiceNow, and with the introduction of their AI-powered Now Platform, they are revolutionizing workflow technology yet again.

In development since 2017, the platform has arrived incredibly quickly. Now includes generative AI, machine learning frameworks, natural language understanding, search and automation, and analytics and process mining that work together to seamlessly enhance employee abilities and customer experiences. Their journey from theory to practice took just six years.

As the company expands into serving the manufacturing sector, the notion that generative AI is a replacement for human intelligence on the shop floor may raise the occasional eyebrow, but Rachel Trombetta, ServiceNow’s field CIO for manufacturing, is happy to bust that myth. “AI doesn’t want to take over people’s jobs. It’s there to assist them and help them make decisions and give the value back to whatever it is they’re doing,” she told BOSS.

Trombetta has been working in advanced manufacturing since 2012. As CIO at GE’s first Industry 4.0 plant, she collaborated with the Industrial Internet Consortium and GE Global Research to modernize manufacturing through the IIoT. Admittedly, the sector has been slow to adopt manufacturing workflow technology, with good reason. “If you think about it there’s a ton of mechanical engineers, process engineers, and people that know how to run planes, and IT people have been forced to put processes behind that. It’s the convergence of those two worlds.”

The mere thought of integrating those worlds sends shivers down the spine, but Trombetta is happy to allay those fears as well. “We pride ourselves on having a single data model. Everything is rewritten to work on the Now Platform. There’s no clunky integrations that you have to do between systems because we’ve realized that once you have key data in the system the world becomes endless. At that point, it’s just processes that you need to digitize and then be able to do AI behind that.”

In a manufacturing plant, jobs and departments touch either the customer or the process itself, so ServiceNow looked for ways to make the deskless worker experience easier. “When we introduced the employee workflows we really had the opportunity to understand our manufacturing customers,” she said. We often think of workflow technology as a tool for executing, visualizing, and expediting office work, but that’s far too limiting when that technology can influence the quality and speed at which products are made.

“When you start to dig in and understand your customers, you’ve got frontline workers to consider,” she added. To use an automotive reference, a dealer or retail store that sells tires or paints that support vehicles intersects with the manufacturer and plant workers because they are components of the manufacturer’s finished product. Advanced workflow technology makes communicating amongst multiple layers of the business easy.

That ease should go a long way in terms of worker retention, given that some of ServiceNow’s OEM customers have 60% turnover in their manufacturing plants every year.

With the launch of the new vertical the company is focusing on the manufacturing value chain. The Now Platform enables manufacturers to begin to design and innovate just as they have on IT projects. Take supply chain, for instance.

In the automotive industry the typical R&D path to a new vehicle can take up to nine years. Throughout that journey there’s a multitude of information to track, including keeping suppliers informed of design changes and issues that impact speed to market and product launch timing.

By automating source-to-pay, ServiceNow users can see how siloed teams impact invoice and payment processing and get a handle on the weaknesses of using ERP systems with only procurement functionality. From a supply chain point of view, many companies place their focus on their ERPs and moving to the cloud for cost. But in addition to meeting regulations and SOX compliance, they also have to be able to understand their sourcing risk as well as those of their suppliers.

Companies growing through mergers and acquisitions need to go across multiple ERPs to get the best pricing, but they also need to have a deep understanding of their supplier ecosystems to identify financial, geographical, or geopolitical risks that impact the business.

Then there’s supplier exception management. “When you’re going through a production line there’s always going to be something that’s going to change,” Trombetta said. She referred to her husband’s purchase of a new truck that took a year to deliver because a seating supplier went out of business.

“If you had a way to interact with their suppliers and the suppliers told you and whoever is doing that supply chain, buying, and purchasing, ‘I can’t make this vehicle; this is going to impact cash. Let me reach out to the customer and find out if what the supplier has said is valuable or if it can be replaced with something else that would have improved the cycle time and their free cash flow.’”

ServiceNow’s value to manufacturers can be demonstrated the with simplest of workflows, Trombetta stressed. “You can save tens to hundreds to thousands of people hours. There’s real value behind that.”

Make it easy on yourself

The Now Platform solves some of the most challenging aspects in manufacturing, ensuring that plant managers and everyone else within an organization can easily communicate and know the status of where things are with certainty. Security was at top of mind in the platform’s creation, particularly securing operational technology assets. “It’s not if you have a security incident, it’s when you have a security incident. How are you going to solve that?” Trombetta posits.

“We see a lot of our customers securing their networks, which is great for that zero-tolerance threat vector that you’re trying to protect. But then how do you understand the software that sits on those big OT pieces of equipment or any other asset inside the environment? Is that software putting you at risk? If that vendor logs in and has something on their laptop, could that shut down your plant? We’ve had that happen at several of our customers.”

The platform allows users to do work associated with those assets. “For example, if you look at an automotive line, when they change their year they have to break down the line and start it back up.

How does that mechanical engineer know what is needed to make sure that everything gets done, whether it’s the quality engineer, the maintenance team, the operators on the floor, the line leaders – everybody involved? How can you do that change behind that?”

The platform is a big help when it comes to working with OEMs who may have their own predictive maintenance or a cloud environment. The platform makes it easy to move from time-based to condition based and then to predictive maintenance in order to run products as long as possible. On the EHS side of the business, ServiceNow can track employee sentiment, quality issues as well as supplier issues.

For Trombetta, the value chain of sales and aftermarket services is particularly exciting. “In the past 10 years we’ve had customer service management and field service management,” she noted. “Now we’re able to help manufacturers take their installed base and deliver more services to their end customers by leveraging our platform.”

ServiceNow is often thought of as an IT tool, but the ability to translate manufacturers’ challenges into opportunities has opened up some excellent partnerships. “As we’re growing this organization, partners are going to be key,” she concluded. “Having a great partnership with all of our ServiceNow partners that want to help us on this journey is personally exciting because we can’t do this alone. It’s going to take all of us.”

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ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) makes the world work better for everyone. Our cloud‑based platform and solutions help digitize and unify organizations so that they can find smarter, faster, better ways to make work flow. So employees and customers can be more connected, more innovative, and more agile. And we can all create the future we imagine. The world works with ServiceNow^TM. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.

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