Building a futureproof ServiceNow environment

Centrica’s 24,000 employees, including 10,000 engineers and technicians, supply energy and services to over 25 million customers in the UK, Ireland and North America through its brands; British Gas and Bord Gáis. It develops innovative solutions like Hive to reflect the increasing importance of technology in energy and services delivery to contribute to a more sustainable world. Centrica takes this responsibility very seriously and wants to accelerate the positive impact it has in society and on the environment

Centrica had been using ServiceNow for over ten years to predominately handle its service management requirements, however, the platform had become highly-customised, making it expensive to maintain and upgrade. A typical upgrade might take up to four months to complete.

The high level of customisation meant Centrica could no longer take advantage of new functionality because of incompatibility with the platform and processes. It was becoming more difficult for Centrica to consider how it could benefit from the platform’s wider business transformation capabilities. When Centrica realised its instance of ServiceNow was holding it back from supporting its digital transformation, it decided to overhaul the platform.

“We were an early adopter of ServiceNow and had it installed before best practice guidelines had been properly established,” explains Raj Oza, Head of ITSM, Centrica. “This made upgrading the system costly and time-consuming. We use ServiceNow across the business and not just as an ITSM tool so refreshing the solution was a priority.”

Centrica issued an RFP and found that Fujitsu demonstrated a strong grasp of its vision and objectives. It recommended rebuilding a fresh instance of ServiceNow, avoiding ustomisation. Fujitsu outlined the implementation plan, centred on a series of agile sprints based on workshops, and led the end-to-end design, scope, development, testing and release strategy.

Fujitsu captured over 1,000 individual user stories and configured the platform to meet those user requirements. Centrica’s 24,000+ users and 4,000+ technical users now enjoy easier access to the full suite of ServiceNow ITSM tools as well as ServiceNow SecOps, ServiceNow ITOM, ServiceNow Cloud Catalogue and ServiceNow HR, making them more productive.

“This time we adhered to simplified configuration and processes, so we weren’t hindered by customisation,” adds Raj. “Fujitsu had expert knowledge of ServiceNow, and collaboratively we followed joint design principles to ensure we created a platform that can grow and evolve to help manage our costs and support our businesses transformation.”

Centrica has seen an immediate change in the pace of adjustments and upgrades on the new platform – from months to days. For example, enabling event management and integrating with AppDynamics was a simple plug-and-play operation rather than months of complex development. The company is more agile and responsive while freeing up internal resources through the collaborative DevOps support team now being in-place, leading to huge cost savings.

Also, internal processes have been streamlined: approvals on change requests have reduced from up to 60 hours to a maximum of four, plus removing over 100 custom fields from the incident process. Centrica and Fujitsu are also introducing virtual agents to drive calls and costs down.

“Everything is much easier to manage and maintain with upgrades being carried out in days, and with a significant reduction in effort. It is easier to track, report and log activity,” concludes Raj. “Fujitsu worked incredibly hard and provided the support we needed to ensure this project was a success. We were so impressed by Fujitsu’s performance that we also offered it the ServiceNow support contract.”