Overview & Challenge
The Client is a leading pet products and services retailer, existing on the market for more than 50 years and providing pet products and services to its customers via their e-commerce website. They have a vast network of pet products and service partners, and as such, they have an enormous number of customers.
To serve its customers in the best possible way, Client’s employees oftentimes have to travel from one place to another. Prior COVID-19 this was an easy thing to do, but COVID-19 made this process a bit challenging. The new travel restrictions reflected on the Client’s operational performance requiring its employees to have a negative COVID-19 test to travel, which affected the resource planning process. Additionally, the entire COVID-19 documentation had to be sent to the appointed managers for travel approval, which was done manually. As such, employees continually forgot to send the documentation on time, while the managers had to focus on ensuring that all documentation was accurate, travel requests were approved on time, and the customers were satisfied.
The management team knew that, in the long run, this process would be quite demanding and time-consuming, so they decided to automate it.
Solution
- A custom-made fill in a form built on ServiceNow
- Notification emails twice per week to remind employees to fill in the form
- Automatic approval of traveling based on the submitted COVID-19 documentation
Business Outcomes
The new functionality implemented within the ServiceNow platform enabled the Client to have immediate information about COVID-19 cases within the company, which supports the resource planning process. Depending on the results, the functionality immediately returns back an answer whether the employee will travel, or a replacement should be found. Key benefits include:
- Increased efficiency and speed of the travel approval process
- The new functionality has given management visibility and availability to all COVID-19 employee-related information
- Automatically scheduled reminder for the employees who need to travel sent via email
- Improved operational efficiency and workforce planning due to management having real time COVID-19 employee-related information.
