Unified culture and process during the merger of Wabtec and GE Transportation with ServiceNow

As early as 2019, Wabtec and GE Transportation decided to merge their organizations to become one of the world’s largest suppliers of trucks and locomotives-with combined revenue of nearly US$9 billion. The newly formed organization now has more than 27,000 employees and operates in more than 50 countries around the world, providing solutions for its freight rail, passenger transportation and industrial customers.

However, merging two organizations of this size requires huge operational effort and rethinking IT, especially in terms of how to provide services to end users. Both companies use ServiceNow for their service desk requirements, but each has its own processes, methods, and cultures that need to be consistent.

Vann Williams, senior manager of Wabtec service desk, spoke at the Now at Work event held by ServiceNow about the project. He explained how the company integrated IT, deployed the Now platform out of the box, provided senior managers with a dashboard to clearly understand the progress being made, and how he also planned to achieve the $8 million savings goal.

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Williams commented on the merger:

This is a very important job. From an IT perspective, it is very detailed, and we need to consider many processes to achieve this goal.

Although the business is the same, the history and culture are completely different. The two teams are very different. The Wabtec organization has more ways to keep it simple, and the GE organization is a very large company. Their ServiceNow instance is very mature because they have the people and data to make it work. Therefore, we need to combine the two.

We need to adopt two platforms, integrate them into one platform, promote efficient processes, and use Wabtec M&A management to make it an IT service, a single experience that meets end users and business goals. And profitability.

this project

Before the merger, Wabtec’s IT team had 250 employees and an annual budget of US$45 million. On the other hand, GE has 1,000 employees, a budget of US$90 million and an annual infrastructure cost of US$45 million. The newly formed 1Wabtec IT structure will be consolidated into a powerful 1,250 organization at a cost of US$145 million. Williams said this created a “synergies” (savings) of approximately $35 million.

Williams added that the main challenges include ensuring that efficient migration to a single ServiceNow instance is required, and ensuring that companies understand why and how to spend money. It hopes to follow ITIL best practices so that its ServiceNow instances can be used out of the box, while reducing costs and unifying the two cultures. He said:

You start to speak, and you say the same sentence, but they say different things. Unifying these cultures is one of the biggest things. We proposed the work of convening the 1Wabtec IT team and worked hard for it. We did it, which is very uniform and satisfying.

Wabtec started the meeting of the project in February and started the first part of the project-incidents, issues, changes and CMDB on June 2. Considering the occurrence of the coronavirus pandemic, this is quite fast. Williams said:

Please keep in mind that we are experiencing COVID. This pandemic not only caused damage to the project, but the company also encountered a problem that end users must work remotely. We must establish a VPN and request a backup monitor, etc. In this process, we must manage it through ServiceNow. This is very happy because our CIO was able to manage the team and said that we have X tickets based on these remote users, and they have all been completed. The management was very very happy and gave our team a personal gratitude.

Wabtec set out to establish a global enterprise-level service desk in multiple countries/regions. This includes growing some teams, for example, the number of people in the Americas team has increased from 26 full-time help desk employees to 40. Williams added:

We must support all the tickets, all the different processes that enter. This is happening all over the world. This is a very difficult project and a lot of work has been done.

Important points

Williams explained that one of the main successes of the project was the visionary that can create KPI dashboards for senior managers so that they can gain insight into the progress being made so that the IT team can justify their expenditures. Created dashboards for senior executive management teams and global service desk leaders. For example, a dashboard was created to highlight when an incident SLA was violated, and for a considerable period of time, the incident occurred less than 2% of the time. Williams said:

When you spend a little bit of money, one of the things management wants to know: What gains did that make me? Where did my money go? Therefore, we set up a KPI for the CIO so that he can quantify the difference, what IT is doing, and how much IT is dealing with, so that we can justify the existence.

Because as we know in IT, sometimes we think of it as an expense, and the profit center wants to know why we can get so much money. We can determine the development direction of the ServiceNow process, the development direction of the IT process and the development prospects for next year.

We must also ensure that certain things are done to help certain businesses remain profitable. What can we do to help them keep certain processes running. We were able to do this and showed them how it works in some reports. As the core of the entire project, one of the biggest things we have to do is to stay within the ITIL framework and use industry best practices-everything works out of the box, so we don’t have any customization in the process. All customizations in the old process are deleted.

Some other aspects of the project include the establishment of CMDB-CI records so that if a user makes a request to the correct business service, it can be immediately assigned to the correct group without any manual intervention or classification. Williams said:

No first-level help desk can touch it, it can reach the group directly. This has brought us many benefits and exceeded our expectations of the effectiveness of this method. They work here and are closed without reassignment.

In addition, Williams is considering how Wabtec can better serve end users and provide them with a better experience through the use of self-service digital tools. He explained:

What makes me happy is to be able to help our end users complete their work. For end users, I am there, but for other IT groups, I am not. Therefore, we created a very simple portal page so that they can easily understand how they can make requests if they need certain services provided by the IT department. They can report whether the incident is damaged, and they can also view any outstanding tickets. I think we can provide up to 60 different request items. They range from people in need of services to requesting PCs or mobile phones, or accessing distribution lists.

Some things we will build for end users in the future is a knowledge base-we do have some knowledge articles built in for IT, but we hope to build a user-friendly knowledge base that will bring some self-help things to our end users in the future .