Globalia boosts operational efficiency with digital workflows from ServiceNow

Globalia delivers an exceptional customer experience through operational excellence
A combined airline, hotel, travel agent, tour operator, and baggage handling businesses, Globalia is a multi-faceted operation that relies on every part of the business supporting and reinforcing the others.

Operational excellence across the whole group is critical to making the puzzle fit together and deliver exceptional customer service experiences.

To support the continued success and growth of the group, Globalia realised new operational efficiencies within its IT service delivery.

Ariel Gritti Tartac, Service and Operations Manager at Globalia, explains: “Because of the varied needs of our different business units, our IT infrastructure was siloed, with little cross-organisation integration. We recognised that by unifying service delivery we could enhance virtually every business process across the whole group.”

Globalia adopts ServiceNow to create a central IT service delivery platform
The big challenge was that the IT support systems and management processes in Globalia were manual, including inventory, service maps, alerts, and managing SLAs.

The benefits of transitioning to a true, best-of-breed IT service management platform were clear, so Ariel set out to replace the mishmash of different systems and management processes with a centralised platform that spanned every business unit.

“We had a system of multiple, internally developed ‘pseudo-ITSM’ tools that were not connected. The burden on my team was huge, as we are only 20 engineers. Just dealing with incoming requests and assigning tasks was a challenge,” says Ariel. “Efficiency is everything and that’s exactly what ServiceNow has enabled us to achieve.”

For Globalia, it was critical to move away from its made-in-house approach and follow industry best practices. “This wasn’t just about finding a one-off solution. We really needed to put a platform in place that would support the entire future direction of the whole business—with scalability to incorporate other functionality down the line,” adds Ariel.

ServiceNow enables self-service to accelerate processes and maximise operational productivity
By standardising IT service delivery through ServiceNow, Globalia has transformed huge swathes of its business processes. The platform has brought far more integration across the business, while digital workflows have transformed the speed of service delivery and reduced issue resolution time.

At the heart of the new solution is a unified service desk, designed to enable self-service for the end user. Accessible via any device, the new central service desk provides a single point of interaction for the whole company—enabling users to manage incidents and service requests, as well as access knowledge articles themselves, without any additional burden on the IT administrators.

As Ariel explains, “We’ve created our equivalent of an ‘internal Amazon’ platform for our users. ServiceNow’s cloud-based approach also means the platform can be used by anyone in the organisation and bring instant benefits to every end user.”

ServiceNow digital workflows save valuable IT developer time
Behind the scenes of the user, the new Globalia service desk has significantly reduced the burden on Ariel’s team.

ServiceNow IT Operations Management gave Ariel’s team a single management interface, which has been crucial in optimising how the IT department works with Globalia’s various business units (BU). Incorporating event management, service mapping, and asset management, the IT operations management solution has enabled the creation of a variety of digital workflows to automatically create incidents, direct responses, and assign tasks across the IT team. This has led to drastic reductions in the time dedicated to the event management, maintenance of service maps and assets, updating the configuration management database (CMBD), and managing asset lifecycles.

“It’s a massive change, but these savings have been achieved with maximum efficiency. I have been able to manage the whole process directly, with no need for additional headcount—a significant saving for the business,” explains Ariel.

With service mapping, digital workflows also manage the delivery of reports back to the business. The IT department charges out its services to the different BUs, but manually populated spreadsheets were used to report on how much resource allocation each department had used and carry out invoicing, which could not provide a full picture for anyone in the business.

Now, every BU has complete visibility of incidents, who is using which IT services, the time taken to resolve issues, and the availability of Ariel’s team—dramatically increasing transparency in the business.

ServiceNow gives Globalia the foundation needed to radically change service delivery and add new services
With ServiceNow IT Service Management and ServiceNow IT Operations Management solutions, the speed of Globalia’s operations has accelerated beyond recognition. Incident resolution time has reduced by 89%; the time to fulfill a request has shrunk by 44%; and first-time resolution of incidents has increased to 88%. Using ServiceNow® Event Management has reduced the number of operator controlled events by 98%.

“The improvements have been very positive and it means the Globalia puzzle fits together better than ever before,” says Ariel. “The key aspect of using ServiceNow is that my team is very happy with the changes. They quickly saw the benefits of the Now Platform® and knew the digitisation of workflows to free up their time was an opportunity, not a threat.”

“Because of ServiceNow, Globalia is now able to take on more projects and deliver new services very quickly. It gives us the foundation for the whole group to continue to thrive,” Ariel adds.

Extending ServiceNow into the fabric of the entire business
With the success of the roll out, Globalia is now looking to extend its use of the Now Platform. Adopting ServiceNow® Change and Release Management and ServiceNow® Cloud Management solutions will enable the organisation to move the vast majority of its business applications to the cloud, creating additional efficiencies as more of the business can be managed via digital workflows.

“I just want to do more; more use cases, more automation, more everything,” says Ariel. “Compared to the custom developments we used to have to tackle, the experience with ServiceNow is exceptional. The dream is for the whole company to be built on ServiceNow.”

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