FPS Health simplifies IT service delivery with ServiceNow

FPS Health is dedicated to the health and safety of its citizens
The Federal Public Service for Public Health, Safety of the Food Chain, and the Environment (FPS Health) is responsible for health, food, animals, plants, and the environment in Belgium. The agency organises health care in Belgium and also takes care of the funding of hospitals, the health care policy, and the coordination of urgent medical assistance. Additionally, FPS Health monitors the safety of products in the food chain and ensures that the EU food safety standards are applied.

Rigorous government technical specifications drive evaluation of IT service management at FPS Health
To best meet the needs of the organization, FPS Health needed an IT service management solution that streamlined management of IT services and provided an efficient service desk with self-service capabilities.

FPS Health decided to switch to ServiceNow® IT Service Management. “The IT service management solution was the successor to a system that had reached the end of its life cycle,” says Kurt Nys, ICT manager at FPS Health. “We simply had the choice between bringing in freelancers for the maintenance of the existing system or switching to another system. We chose the second option.”

“We drew up technical specifications for the new IT service management platform and issued a call for tenders via the Belgian government,” Kurt continues. “In Belgium, that is a fairly complicated procedure, because

technical specifications for IT service management systems are also stipulated by the federal government and only a limited number of systems meet the requirements.”

The responses to the call for tenders were assessed by three people from the organisation. Eventually, five systems were found to meet their requirements. “The funny thing is that of these five responses, two were from companies that made a proposal to implement ServiceNow,” says Kurt.

ServiceNow is the foundation for a streamlined, automated helpdesk at FPS Health
The ServiceNow implementation focused entirely on IT. “First of all, we wanted to structure incident reporting, request submission, carrying out processes from the service desk, and configuration management. In the old system, that was still fairly chaotic,” says Patrick Delhaye, ICT service desk manager at FPS Health.

For the implementation, 15 members of the ICT department shut themselves in a room and meticulously charted the existing process flow and activities of upwards of a hundred ICT services. Then they automated these processes with the help of the Now Platform.

“The implementation was particularly successful. Just five months after the start of the implementation, the first incident was reported via ServiceNow,” says Patrick. “Since then, the system has been permanently available. In the following phases, we set up asset management, developed knowledge management, and fleshed out the management of contracts and certificates. The implementation of change management and problem management followed. ServiceNow was also made available to the Contact Center, which deals with requests from citizens via web forms, email, and telephone.”

ServiceNow improves HR service delivery with automated workflows and clearly defined tasks
The agency opened ServiceNow for human resource management (HRM) services, which was a real milestone because HRM services had not been run by a system. For that matter, the HRM portal and the HRM service catalogue were established separately from the IT service desk, making it clear to staff that the HRM portal is not a spin-off of the IT portal but a full-fledged HRM solution.

In the past, staff sent emails to the HRM department with requests, but it wasn’t clear who should deal with each request and how they should be handled. With ServiceNow, the HRM services—just like requests for the IT department—are precisely defined. After being filled in, requests are automatically sent to the responsible departments to be dealt with as part of a process.

The onboarding of new staff is a great example because several departments are involved. “When a request for the onboarding of a new member of staff goes to HRM now, tasks are also automatically prepared for the ICT department—such as issuing login IDs, preparing a network connection, preparing an access badge, and informing the account manager of the department,” says Patrick.

For FPS Health, the implementation of the HRM services was a sizeable job, because they had no experience with a comparable solution. A service catalogue had to be developed, and tasks and workflows had to be defined.

“From my point of view, the workflow editor is the most exceptional component of ServiceNow. Adding workflows, tasks, people, and approvals is done very simply by adding fields on the screen and using option tables. It takes no more than 10 minutes. And automatic reports are prepared for all these activities,” says Patrick.

One unique challenge was the bilingualism of the Belgian service. ServiceNow is admittedly available in many languages, but the possibilities for making the system available in two languages simultaneously proved more challenging. But eventually they succeeded.

Employee self-service helps FPS Health improve employee satisfaction and HR productivity
Patrick is very satisfied with the Now Platform. “We target the KPIs for service management and this indicates that the results are extremely good. We see that 60% of the incidents are now already reported via self-service, easing the pressure on the helpdesk. The helpdesk manages to deal with 72% of the reports adequately itself, so only a small percentage of incidents are escalated.”

Thanks to ServiceNow, Patrick obtains a wide view of the performances. He analyses the reports monthly and notes that in general the KPIs are achieved. “We see, for instance, that the average time it takes to solve a problem is 30 minutes at the moment. There have only been a few longer cases, such as once in July during the holiday period and once in December.”

The service was closed for 10 days then, but the officials also reported incidents from home, which were all neatly recorded. For HRM requests, the turnaround time has fallen from 5.3 days to two days. A survey conducted among staff indicates that 90% of the staff are satisfied or very satisfied with the service provided.

Patrick is convinced that the role of the helpdesk in resolving problems and dealing with reports by telephone will become even smaller. Self-service will prove to be the main asset. “Some groups of staff members make little use of the self-service solutions and often call upon the telephone helpdesk. So the telephone share still accounts for around 35% of the total. We want to make self-service even easier by developing mini-procedures so that even staff with limited knowledge of ICT can resolve simple problems themselves step by step.”

ServiceNow becomes a preferred supplier for the Belgian government
Due to the outstanding experiences with ServiceNow at FPS Health, other government services are also planning to work with ServiceNow. The organisation has brought its experience with ServiceNow to the attention of Smals—a sort of intermediary between institutions in the social sector, health care, and other government services.

Smals supports and assists institutions with their information management and ICT policy so that they can offer their users effective and efficient services. To do this, among other things Smals concludes framework contracts with suppliers so that the affiliated institutions can benefit from one another’s experiences and obtain attractive conditions for the acquisition of systems. Smals has now concluded a framework agreement with ServiceNow, so in the coming years the ICT company can consider itself the preferred supplier for the Belgian authorities. Various other government services have already signed the framework contract.

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