Case study

Furniture company leverages RSM WorkHub to align IT to the growing business

RSM’s ServiceNow solution streamlines and optimizes IT work

September 03, 2022
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ServiceNow Technology consulting Business applications

With business expanding, furniture company increases its insight and efficiency

In any industry, as organizations grow and volume increases they can lose visibility into key processes. Success brings product and location expansions which can overwhelm manual or outdated functions. Ultimately, this causes companies to lose visibility, efficiency and control. In many of these cases, technology solutions and enhanced automation can often step in and bring better stability and clarity to the situation.

Our client is an eco-friendly, American-made furniture company that has undergone some significant, positive changes through the years. The company was initially a private label manufacturer, developing furniture for several well-known retailers. However, they have recently transitioned into a multichannel retailer, developing their own brand and label in recent years with much of the business now coming from custom furniture built in a nearly 1,000,000-square-foot modern factory.

RSM offers an enterprise-grade solution at an attainable price point. They demystified the complexity of ServiceNow and gave us what we needed to understand our IT workload and streamline our project management processes.
Chief technology officer, Client furniture company

Challenges related to growth

The company’s chief technology officer (CTO) began at the company early in this period of growth and recognized some challenges with how IT issues were handled. They had an IT tracking system, but they needed better clarity around their service levels to ensure departmental accountability. In addition, the company required more robust reporting, alerts and notifications, along with details into overall workload and work intake.

“In my first few weeks, I saw the emails and the requests—there were so many ways that the technology team was being hit up to do things and I had no visibility into what was going on,” the CTO says. “Were we working on the right things? We needed to bring some more sanity to the process and add some structure.”

Looking forward to the company growing further and becoming more complex, the executive recognized that a management tool was necessary to increase visibility, governance and prioritization within the IT function. He had previous experience with ServiceNow at a large retailer but thought the workflow solution might be out of reach at his current company.

However, after RSM US LLP conducted an IT assessment, RSM WorkHub, powered by ServiceNow, was suggested as a platform that could help address the organization’s IT management challenges.

“I didn’t even think of ServiceNow because I thought it was out of our price range,” the executive says. “But when I started having conversations with RSM, I was very surprised. I thought ‘Wow, this could be something we could implement and adopt.’”

How RSM can help

A new solution transforms the IT function

The company worked with RSM to implement RSM WorkHub, leading to significant benefits. The solution has consolidated IT service management and strategic portfolio management (SPM) applications into a single platform, centralizing workflow and eliminating disparate systems.

Following the implementation, the company now has a first-class IT service management system where they can manage their intake not only by inbound email, but also by a client-facing service portal with a service catalog. Users can submit incidents, project requests, enhancement requests, onboarding requests and new desktop requests with ease. Tickets are routed through RSM WorkHub to the appropriate departments for more streamlined project management, while enhanced reporting and service-level agreement creation brings accountability to the department and enables the appropriate setting of expectations.

“As we got into the ServiceNow functionality and implemented it, the platform is so much richer than it was previously,” the CTO says. “Especially when we got into the IT business management module—it’s just shocking how deep and how much functionality there is now.”

From an IT team perspective, employees now can manage their work in one place. They also can now manage their yearly planning through ideation and manage their ad hoc project intake process through demand management. More robust assessments and prioritization capabilities align to the company’s strategic framework, ensuring IT is supporting the entire organizational vision.

"RSM offers an enterprise-grade solution at an attainable price point,” the CTO says. “They demystified the complexity of ServiceNow and gave us what we needed to understand our IT workload and streamline our project management processes.”

Supporting the ongoing evolution of IT

Ultimately, the RSM WorkHub solution has given the company the ability to manage all their IT work in one place and a clear vision into whether resources are underallocated or overallocated in certain areas.

In addition, with the new emphasis on IT optimization, the company has established an IT steering committee. At those monthly meetings, the CTO uses the insight and data from RSM WorkHub to report on the tickets IT has for the month and how they are classified, demonstrating the value of the function to stakeholders.

“It’s been an awakening, which I knew it would be,” he says. “We are seeing benefits in terms of the workload; we’re starting to see patterns in data to identify problem areas and email has come down because users can simply update a ticket. So, yes to productivity, yes to visibility, yes to workload, and yes to prioritization and escalation.”

With RSM WorkHub, the company has the foundation to begin looking toward additional resource management in other areas of the business. They plan on building out the SPM module further, including gaining a greater understanding of time management and the breakdown of operational versus project work. With the success of the platform, discussions are ongoing to determine where its functionality can be further utilized.

After implementing the new workflow solution, the furniture company has broken down barriers between IT and the business, enabling greater communication and collaboration. The IT department is now in greater alignment with organizational goals and is more proactive with solutions and less reactive to problems, providing greater value and efficiency, and becoming more of a strategic partner to the business.

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