Food Processor Saves $750K Annually With ServiceNow's Investment Planner

A ServiceNow customer in the Food Processing space was frustrated by a continual disconnect between their strategic goals and lower-tier tactical efforts.  Because efforts were not synchronized, efforts geared toward items that seemed important at face value did not connect back to strategic goals. An overall lack of understanding permeated the enterprise as to why some of the most brilliant strategies developed were failing to propel the business forward.  They wanted a solution that could ensure their holistic visioning was being distributed and correctly interpreted across its business units. At the same time, they sought a path to improve internal collaboration, synergy, and to synchronize Executive visioning in order to ensure that goal realization was improving financial performance.

THE SOLUTION: An Investment-Planning Process That Focuses On The Entire Lifecycle Of IT Spend

Align met with customer leadership to emphasize the importance of including business units during the planning phase, thereby enabling these departments to act as drivers toward achieving strategic objectives. We were able to show the myriad benefits of implementing Investment Planner, including how the customer could achieve the most realistic cost projections that would account for unique cost drivers across every department. This data, in turn, would allow Executives to to more accurately understand the trade-off between operational expenses and strategic investments toward achieving the organization’s ‘big picture’. With improved situational awareness, leadership would gain a better understanding of its resident costs, including hidden drivers across each department, and could absorb with more contextual perspective the depth of pursuing a large strategic objective instead of committing time and resources toward retiring accumulated technical debt from various departments.

THE RESULT: Over 34% Savings During Their Three-Year Investment Planner Cycle

  By implementing ServiceNow’s Investment Planner, Align’s customer was able to dramatically reduce the generic disconnect between strategic goals and tactical work efforts, creating a synergy that emphasized communication and constant collaboration. With Investment Planner, business units were granted an opportunity to look inward and address how their department could reposition toward helping the enterprise reach its high-level goals. ServiceNow’s Investment Planner was able to take the enterprise outside of the competitive landscape, offering previously inaccessible insight to better understand and control tactical and strategic expenses. Something as simple as retiring 100 end-of-life laptops, for instance, could dramatically alter a department’s capacity to invest that capital toward a strategic pursuit. Investment Planner linked all elements of the organization under a unified framework that streamlined the language, methodology, accounting, and awareness derived from its corporate strategy.