A major Northern European retailer saves a great number of manual work hours with ServiceNow by streamlining maintenance requests for handheld scanners across stores. Discover their proactive solution, boosting productivity and customer satisfaction. 

The retail company, which is located in Northern Europe and has more than 12.000 employees, uses handheld scanners in their stores to collect inventory information and for customer self-service in some shops. This solution provides efficient processes for both customers and employees. However, the handheld scanners need maintenance - like changing batteries and doing repairs. Therefore, the retail company has an agreement with a third-party vendor to take care of this. At first, the maintenance process was like this: The vendor’s service technicians used to get daily urgent service requests when the scanners didn’t work. This meant that the service technician would drive to the store and change the battery on one device, and then the next day, another device went out of service, and a service technician would drive to the store again to fix that device and so forth.  

This reactive process resulted in dissatisfied customers, as they often discovered that the scanners were broken or out of battery and thereby couldn’t complete their checkout. Also, this resulted in much manual work for the in-store employees who couldn't do their job. In other words, the maintenance process was time-consuming and inefficient - especially as many stores have ten folds and up to hundreds of handheld devices. 

Integration with ServiceNow was the right solution

To make the maintenance process more efficient, the retail company got help from The Cloud People to build a better solution that could integrate the company with third-party vendors. The solution was to integrate ServiceNow with the handheld scanners’ operating system (OS) through a REST API and create automated workflows. The software in the scanners provides Business Intelligence about the devices, i.e., battery life, charging capacity, maintenance needs, and overall device status and health. By making a robust integration utilizing Integration hub between ServiceNow and the devices, the retail company is now able to automatically send requests directly to the vendor’s task management system and suggest proactive maintenance, which prevents downtime and broken devices. 

Acting on a batch of requests and doing proactive maintenance

Today, the information regarding maintenance flows automatically between the retail company and the vendor. When the vendor’s service technician completes the tasks on location, the retail company’s ITSM system is automatically updated. The new solution saves both the company and the vendor a great number of man-hours. Instead of responding to a single service request, the third-party vendor is now acting on batch of  requests and doing more - primarily - proactive maintenance on each attendance. This means the retail company’s customers and employees are not experiencing defect scanners, as this is taken care of before they run out of battery. 

The benefits for the customer

Utilizing ServiceNow ITSM and Integration Hub with the help from The Cloud People has given the retail company several benefits such as:

• Saving many manual work hours which free up time for more valuable work such as better customer service in the stores. 
• Saving a lot of unnecessary travel time and reducing expenses. 
• Fewer service cars on the roads, which are better for the environment.
• Going from reactive to proactive maintenance
• Increasing customer satisfaction as the self-service scanners are always functioning.
• Better employee satisfaction due to less technology downtime.
• A more productive workforce.