Growth does not come without challenges. CDW experienced this firsthand when it expanded its service offerings and underwent the process of incorporating several new acquisitions. The company needed to get new data efficiently and on scale as it grew its team and portfolio, CDW presenters John Manna and Greg Wheeler explained Thursday at Knowledge 2022.
Speaking to a standing room-only audience in New York at a session titled “Moving from Tactical to Strategic with ServiceNow at CDW,” first outlined Manna, senior manager of ServiceNow solutions, and Wheeler, practice manager of SPM solutions, the needs of the organization. They then talked about the ways the unified ServiceNow platform has allowed the company to evaluate ROI both for itself and for its customers.
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Evaluation and Monitoring of Services Provided to Customers
As CDW expanded its portfolio of services through acquisitions and other means, the company quickly realized it needed a way to capture new processes and data.
Leaders need to know the sales cycle, the pipeline and how to begin the engagement process, Wheeler says. Furthermore, different interactions take on different skill sets.
“We work half on ServiceNow and half on spreadsheets. There are some people who are probably still working a napkin on their desk, “Manna said.” We do the work, but we haven’t been able to measure. “
Using the application development platform, CDW developed a customer relationship management system with ServiceNow to make data easier to manage. This has helped the company better understand the needs and potential opportunities of its customers.
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The CDW team has also developed a database of skills so that the organization can assign the best employees to any particular project.
Using the data available on the ServiceNow platform, CDW can also better predict and evaluate the services it provides to customers. This in turn helped the company evaluate its own ROI and share information with customers about the ROI of their investments.
Company Acquisition Drives Growth and Automation
As the company expands rapidly (it acquired four or five organizations last year, Wheeler said), IT and HR departments need a way to train everyone on the same platform. The organizations acquired by CDW used different programs and had different software licenses, which resulted in the need for integration.
“It’s a platform conversation, but it’s also a conversation process,” Wheeler said. If processes are proven to be consistent, reliable and repeatable, the organization will look to optimize and automate them throughout the company. “With all the new organizations coming in, we’re starting to look at the best in the race of those processes” just as they do for customers, he explained.
This allows CDW to identify the needs of its team and place its people in the best positions based on department growth and employee interests. By integrating processes, the company also reduces its technical depth and can put more resources into optimizing each process.
Today, the company optimizes processes for customers in the same way to drive more ROI.
“ROI could be dollars, it could be time equivalent of dollars or it could be the equivalent of more strategic initiatives where we can create some resources,” Manna said. “We’re constantly looking at driving more ROI for our customers and, at the same time, in -house.”
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