BioMar’s global IT organisation has undergone a significant transformation and the company is now in a position to reap the benefits, as it chose to gather everything together on a ServiceNow platform. It is a solution that has opened up much more efficient work processes for both the IT department and the 1,600 employees.

Need for professionalisation and standardisation

BioMar is one of the leading suppliers in the world of high-performance fish feed to the aquaculture industry. The company currently employs more than 1,600 people and distributes fish feed to 80 different countries. As a global operator enjoying almost explosive growth, BioMar identified an increasing need to professionalise and standardise its global IT organisation. The intention was to ensure that all users would have the same experience of the company’s IT service, and to promote synergies and knowledge sharing between all departments.

From decentralised to centralised

BioMar originally operated a decentralised IT organisation, where the individual countries and departments all had their own internal IT support functions. This meant that many assignments were dealt with on an ad hoc basis, and that there was no common standard for the company’s IT service. In view of this, the company decided to centralise its IT organisation and to implement ServiceNow as the underlying platform. The process was divided into three tracks: IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Business Management (ITBM) and Application Portfolio Management (APM), which were designed and implemented in parallel by three different project teams and consultants from Syspeople.

New opportunities with MyIT

In order to accommodate the request for a common standard for the company’s IT service, one of the first moves BioMar made was to establish a multilingual service portal with an associated service catalogue, which was named “MyIT”. MyIT is supported by the new processes that BioMar has had implemented in ServiceNow: Incident (incl. Major Incident Management), Knowledge Management, Request Fulfilment, Change Management, Problem Management, CMDB and APM. The new portal makes it possible for the 1,600 employees to access guidelines and instructions, check operational status and submit requests and incident reports to the IT department. Such enquiries were previously dealt with via email, which was extremely time-consuming. The new ITSM solution has already started freeing up time in the global IT organisation as tasks are being dealt with much more efficiently, and the 1,600 employees can now find the answers to a range of questions themselves in the service portal: MyIT.

Prioritisation and visualisation

Other requests from BioMar were to obtain an overview of the numerous IT projects and to be able to prioritise tasks and visualise value creation out in the business. The solution was to set up an “Idea portal” where users can submit ideas, wishes and requests to the IT organisation. In addition, BioMar implemented a demand process, where the qualified ideas from the Idea portal are screened and more finely filtered. At present, the approved projects are transferred to the Project Management module, where the IT department can quickly form an overview of its numerous projects and deadlines. Through the implementation of ITBM, the IT organisation at BioMar can underpin the strategic initiatives and document the value they create, given that the department now has a full overview of its portfolio of IT projects and only allocates time and resources to projects that have been qualified and approved in the demand process.