Unlocking the value of the Now Platform

With its beginnings in 1847, C. Steinweg Group has grown to become a leading provider of storage, handling, forwarding, chartering, and other logistics services throughout the world. Its thousands of employees man offices, warehouses, and terminals at strategic locations, ensuring that the company is well-equipped to handle a wide range of cargo.

Steinweg is a market-leading global logistics service provider with almost 175 years of experience in forward thinking and innovation. The large scale of operations means that more than 5,500 employees in 65 countries provide storage, handling, forwarding, chartering, and other logistics services.

With so many offices and various subsidiaries, Steinweg decided to rely on Fujitsu to implement ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) to replace legacy platforms that were no longer fit for Steinweg’s global operations and the growing demand on IT from the business. However, the company soon realized that its small and centralized IT department in the Netherlands was struggling with the scale of its responsibilities which included development, testing, incident management, and staying on top of the latest features.

“We believed that we could do everything ourselves,” says Evans Sarfo Boadi, ServiceNow Product Owner at Steinweg. “But we didn’t have the resources or the skills, and demand from the business was high and intense. So we asked Fujitsu for help.”

A combined development setup was proposed, whereby Fujitsu NL continued to provide advisory services but oversaw a new addition—its Global Delivery Center (GDC) developers. This provided Steinweg with an expanded team whose prime focus was ensuring the use of best practices with a specific quality assurance focus. Fujitsu is now managing the solution and has helped Steinweg rediscover the full value of ServiceNow.

More specifically, the new approach includes a combination of outsourcing development and quality assurance to Fujitsu GDC, which is also supporting Steinweg in managing incidents, and on-site consultancy to focus on ServiceNow adoption and vision development. “It has made my life easier to have die-hard developers from GDC and to have project management on top of it to streamline the requirements for my stakeholders and make sure that we meet our standard way of working within ServiceNow,” says Boadi.

The adoption of new features decreased from an average of seven months down to two. Onboarding new countries is now possible, with South Africa being fully onboarded in four months, and the delivery of projects to production only takes two weeks, which took a year to implement before. The company has also introduced reliable automation and a good structure for access requests while moving back to out-of-the-box functionalities and removing all the customizations that had been implemented in the beginning. This will simplify any upcoming updates to the solution.

The original aim of working with Fujitsu was to reduce the operational effort for Steinweg, freeing it to focus on wider challenges, the adoption of new features, and long-term goals. According to Boadi, this has been achieved successfully. “It gave me the chance to do more innovation,” he comments. “I don’t have to look into details of ServiceNow but can focus on the needs of the business itself.”

The shared outlook on challenges and problems aligns with the company’s need to meet various goals that include privacy and data security, as well as product safety and quality. Having a dedicated group of developers who are experts in these fields makes all the difference, allowing the company to divide work according to its roadmap.

“To make sure ServiceNow meets our ideal landscape, Steinweg and the ServiceNow architects from Fujitsu NL do the innovation part and GDC focuses on the development part,” says Boadi. “This way of working was completely new for us, but it gives us the space we need.

The companies also share the aim of strengthening the means of implementation and revitalizing the global partnership for sustainable development. Streamlining and simplifying tasks is a way to achieve their goals while ensuring more productive and efficient work environments. The close collaboration and division of work has created a sweet spot for Steinweg where it can focus on its broader sustainable goals while relying on experts to work on the day-to-day tasks.

With South Africa already onboarded, Steinweg is moving forward with the rest of its locations. Out of 65 countries, 16 are already in the system, but not yet fully at the level of the Netherlands or South Africa. The challenge of going country by country is, however, more than manageable and Steinweg is already looking to implement other plans that build on the solid foundation now available to the company.

Among them could be the expansion of ServiceNow solutions and the implementation of Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), which is on the company’s innovation roadmap, together with other modules. Moving to a CSDM (Common Service Data Model) for incident management will also make it easier to get the Steinweg group of companies within ServiceNow. In addition, Fujitsu will help Steinweg with setting up follow-the-sun 24/7 service support in ServiceNow.

All these plans are reliant on the close relationship between the two companies and their similar approach to work. “Something I really admire about Fujitsu is their ability to be honest and tell me if it’s not possible to do something my way and advise me how else I can do it,” says Boadi, stressing the value of relationships at Steinweg. “Even though they’re Fujitsu employees, they are Steinweg employees. I see them as our own people. So, if you have that mindset that you can trust someone, that they come first as a person, work will follow.

When asked about the guided way of approaching ServiceNow, Boadi points out that, for any company, there should be a clear roadmap and a standard way of working that will help the collaboration with GDC. “But that should not be the main point,” he adds. “You have to learn the importance of abandoning the thought that you can do everything by yourself. Partner with Fujitsu who has the knowledge and skills to do it for you.”