TAL Apparel achieves global customer service excellence with ServiceNow

Moving from legacy systems onto a digital platform

TAL Group, through its TAL Apparel business, delivers a wide range of products and services, including garment manufacturing capabilities, to the world’s leading fashion brands and retailers. Innovation is intrinsic to the company’s DNA, underscored by its significant investment in research and engineering.

“We compete on innovation, service, and quality. In addition, we believe in social and environmental sustainability,” say Kai Kiang, Vice President, Information Technology, TAL Apparel.

The company uses technology to deliver innovation across its information systems and textile and garment development and production processes—and to realize its green objectives.

TAL Apparel sees streamlined service delivery as vital to future success
Since its early days, TAL Apparel has invested in IT to boost collaboration and productivity throughout its business. In recent years, this strategy took a leap forward with the development and execution of a digital transformation strategy. According to Kai, “We decided to move from legacy systems onto next-generation digital platform that would power our business into the next decade.”

As part of this initiative, the company chose to migrate from a number of legacy tools that automated IT help desk and project management processes, quality assurance, and defect tracking. As implemented, these systems did not give IT the visibility it required into the service levels delivered, resources expended, or project completion times. In addition, they could not aggregate and analyze project and service-level data, making it impossible to identify trends or resolve recurring problems.

The TAL team began searching for a cloud-based platform to manage IT projects, infrastructure, applications, services, and operations for its 11 factories in six countries, and 25,000 employees worldwide.

TAL Apparel realizes its vision for holistic service management across the enterprise with a complete IT service management solution from ServiceNow
TAL Apparel evaluated a number of project portfolio management, application lifecycle management, and IT service management packages and ultimately selected ServiceNow^® IT Service Management.

Kai says: “With ServiceNow, we saw a vision and direction for bringing the whole suite of IT processes into a single platform and integrating them for a holistic management approach.”

Through discussions with ServiceNow, TAL Apparel realized it could use the platform to track the IT project portfolios across its enterprise, finance, human capital management, supply chain management, manufacturing, and IT functions. The business would be able to view all IT projects that had been proposed, approved, were in progress, or completed for each function. It could also track each project’s planned or approved budget, resources, requirements, tasks, schedule, status, and releases.

Success leads to further application deployments at TAL Apparel
TAL Apparel initially implemented ServiceNow’s incident management, problem management, change management, and release management applications. It then deployed ServiceNow^® Agile Development to support its application development processes. Kai explains: “We’re using ServiceNow Agile Development to track user stories, sprints, tests, defects, and releases for our application development.”

TAL Apparel also deployed ServiceNow^® Project Portfolio Management to track project proposals and requests across key functions. The business lists project initiatives for its executive council to prioritize and approve. These decisions dictate the allocation of resources and funding to projects. Project managers can then use ServiceNow to track project delivery and spend, while division heads can produce progress reports for the council to review.

TAL Apparel is now looking into deploying additional ServiceNow solutions to automate IT auditing and risk management processes; and is working on delivering automated, constantly refreshed system availability and service-level management figures via its dashboard.

“We’re getting close to achieving everything we wanted with the Now Platform,” Kai says.

ServiceNow automates IT service delivery for TAL Apparel employees, freeing IT to focus on preventative and proactive maintenance
TAL Apparel is automating IT services for employees such as onboarding and offboarding, system account creation, provisioning new PCs, and phones. Upcoming, employees can also download and install applications from an enterprise store or—once they receive the required approvals—install software without IT needing to be involved.

"As well as improving user satisfaction, the automation enabled by ServiceNow has helped reduce the workload of our IT team,” Kai says. “That allows us to deliver new IT capabilities and services, and to undertake more proactive and preventive maintenance automation."

The company is also working to integrate ServiceNow with infrastructure monitoring and application performance management tools. These tools constantly monitor infrastructure and applications for anomalies that may cause outages or degrade performance. In the first instance, the anomalies trigger self-healing scripts that may restart the relevant process or reboot the relevant server. If the issue is unresolved, it is escalated to a ServiceNow incident team, ahead of a ticket being lodged by a user.

TAL Apparel sees faster response times to incidents, and fewer recurrences, with ServiceNow
TAL Apparel is focused on adoption rather than precise measures of improvement. However, Kai reports that the business is experiencing better response times and fewer recurrent incidents with ServiceNow. Recently, the average time to close out all incidents fell from three days to 1.5 days, while the average time to close out P1 incidents fell from three days to 2.5 hours.

The company has extended its use of ServiceNow to manage application testing and releases for all four of its application teams and plans to provide those teams with additional insights using the Now Platform.

“I’d like our application managers to use ServiceNow to manage performance and quality measures such as defect ratios, testing coverage, productivity, and coverage of user requirements,” explains Kai. 

ServiceNow helps TAL Apparel streamline problem and change management
Deploying ServiceNow^® Problem Management enabled TAL Apparel to identify and analyze the root cause of problems, helping teams implement long-term solutions and improvements that minimize the chance of a recurrence. Solutions and improvements are entered into the Now Platform as requests for application enhancement or project proposals seeking approval.

Kai says that with ServiceNow^® Change Management, it is easier than ever to log change requests for approval, and to track configuration changes to improve system reliability and problem diagnosis.

TAL Apparel will use ServiceNow to measure project quality and track business value
TAL Apparel is now tracking new projects—including digital transformation projects—with the Now Platform.

Kai says: “Once the adoption phase is over, we’ll look at measurement in terms of project quality—including delivery on time to quality standards to scope and within budget. In the longer term, we plan to track business value realization. As part of that, before we start a project, we’ll take a baseline shot of the key performance indicators we plan to measure. After the project is delivered, we’ll measure the improvements.”