Hudson uses ServiceNow to leverage processes and let users self-serve

Hudson is a global talent solutions company with expertise in leadership and specialised recruitment, contracting solutions, recruitment process outsourcing and talent management.

Hudson leverages deep industry and market knowledge and proprietary assessment tools to help businesses and professionals achieve higher performance and outstanding results. Operating in 20 countries, including Australia and New Zealand, Hudson combines broad geographic presence, worldclass talent solutions and a tailored, consultative approach to attract, develop and retain the best and brightest people for their customers.

Challenge

Hudson has a centralised Customer Experience Team (CET) that engages with customers and temporary staff and contractors to effectively manage their lifecycle (on-boarding and off-boarding), timesheet management and front-line support on issue resolution. The team was using an ageing service management system that would constantly fail and had limited functionality.

Brett Reedman, IT director, Asia-Pacific, Hudson, said, “There was a burning need to replace this system because it simply wasn’t fit for purpose any longer. If we didn’t make it a priority, the system would eventually fail, which would potentially damage the brand and cause loss of revenue. The CET needed a system it could rely on.”

Hudson also planned to insource its IT function, which had previously been outsourced.

Reedman said, “The outsourced model no longer suited our business and culture. For example, Hudson has a lot of in-house designed applications, which are difficult for an outsourced partner to fully understand without being entrenched in the organisation.

“The IT team would be more agile and provide a better quality of service, as well as achieving financial savings, by insourcing. It would have been impossible to insource the IT function without an improved service management system.”

These two needs combined to create an opening for a system that could effectively plan, design, deliver, operate and control IT services for both internal and external users.

Solution

Hudson considered a number of options and chose ServiceNow to be implemented by DXC Fruition, DXC Technology’s global ServiceNow practice.

Reedman said, “It was important to find a system that could strategically expand in our business from a corporate perspective. ServiceNow is known as an industry leader when it comes to the toolset. The product is innovative and developing, which was important for us. It is easy and fast to implement out of the box with a partner like Fruition Partners (now DXC Fruition), which was attractive to Hudson because we wanted to minimise disruption and downtime. And, finally, it’s not a difficult system to learn while still offering plenty of flexibility to make changes without affecting the core system functionality. All of this meant it was the right choice for both the CET and the IT insourcing project.

“Hudson chose to work with Fruition Partners (now DXC Fruition) because we saw them as a trusted partner, having brought ServiceNow to Australia originally. As a known partner with extensive knowledge, it made sense to partner with them.”

Working with DXC Fruition, it took less than 3 months to implement ServiceNow for the CET with no noticeable downtime.

Reedman said, “No one in the business noticed any downtime, and the only difference was the system’s vastly improved performance and capability. The IT implementation was similarly fast and simple.

“At one point in the project both teams lost a key resource, but Fruition Partners (now DXC Fruition) immediately filled the gap and there was no impact on the timeline.”

Benefits

Following the smooth implementation process, Hudson has seen benefits straight away, and feedback from business users has been positive.

Reedman said, “Having a self-service portal in place reduces the time it takes to complete routine tasks, since people can simply do it themselves. This delivers greater visibility all around. For example, the IT portal lets people log requests, self-serve certain functions, and understand where their requests are up to.

“Often IT is seen as a black hole where people request things and don’t hear back. ServiceNow lets us communicate clearly with users, setting expectations and reducing people’s reliance on IT support.

“It also allows us to track particular issues and find the root cause, helping us to eliminate recurring problems. ServiceNow delivers a greater level of visibility across the business. It also makes it easier for the business to comply with legal and regulatory requirements, since there is more detailed reporting and a high level of auditability.

“In most organisations it’s difficult to have standardised visibility across corporate groups. ServiceNow delivers exactly that, which is very exciting for Hudson’s leadership group.”

A key benefit of working with DXC Fruition was the company’s tendency to challenge Hudson’s established processes.

Reedman said, “Often it’s tempting to use the same processes and simply import those processes into the new system, rather than look at how the new system can change and improve processes.

“Working with the experienced people at Fruition Partners (now DXC Fruition) meant that the Hudson team was constantly challenged to think about how to improve, simplify and streamline processes.

“This translated to lots of small changes which, combined, had a significant effect on the organisation. ServiceNow is already ITIL-compliant, and the Fruition Partners (now DXC Fruition) team has a great depth of knowledge about ITIL processes and how they should work. This helped keep the project on track.”

Future Plans

Hudson plans to extend its ServiceNow implementation across the organisation, one department at a time.

The Human Resource department is likely to be next, followed by Legal, Marketing and Finance, in a project likely to take approximately 18 months.

Reedman said, “Once the Human Resource department is using ServiceNow, we anticipate seeing benefits like having a single source of truth for all HR records throughout Asia-Pacific. This will dramatically streamline on-boarding and offboarding, for example.

“Lots of companies don’t understand the value of using ServiceNow as a corporate layer system. Most corporate layers have disparate systems, which can get complicated, but ServiceNow sits over the top to simplify service management.

“There is so much functionality in ServiceNow that Hudson considers this implementation to be more of a journey than a project.”