Adidas Digital Transformation Initiatives

About the Customer

Inspired by our heritage, we push the boundaries of culture and human performance. Through sport, Adidas has the power to change lives. Headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, Adidas employs more than 60,000 people across the globe.

Scope and Challenges

Daniel Witherspoon, Senior Service Manager at Adidas, explained, “We wanted to engage the entire organisation with a modern approach to service delivery, but our old system simply couldn’t deliver on this vision. Overall transparency of service delivery was below expectation, only partially considering best practices, and many applications/tools lived in disparate environments. We had no capability to conduct end-to-end reporting or fully analyse our activities.”

Following a comprehensive selection process, involving 16 vendors, ServiceNow was was selected as the platform of choice by Adidas. The team had an ambitious set of requirements and ServiceNow sat head and shoulders above the competition. “Our service management platform had to deliver across an extensive range of features and functionality. Usability was a critical factor and the new solution had to integrate easily with our existing environment. ServiceNow gave us a best-of-breed, enterprise-grade platform that ensured we didn’t have to compromise on any aspect of our requirements,” says Witherspoon.

The roll-out of the Now Platform was strategically planned by the Global Service Management team for minimum disruption and maximum positive effect. The move away from on-premises systems to the ServiceNow cloud-delivery model supported the implementation approach.

In 2015, the organisation went live with its ASPEN Service Shop–a portal for its global workforce to request and order services, software, and hardware. Incident/Problem Management and Request Fulfilment was added in early 2016 and, more recently, Change Management, to minimize change-related incidents/problems and to ensure a sophisticated and efficient global change management approach, including a tight integration with SAP TRACE (change transport authentication). “At adidas, we’re all about making an impact and we didn’t want to be running multiple instances and systems at any time,” says Witherspoon. “ServiceNow’s cloud-delivery approach enabled us to easily and rapidly migrate tens of thousands of users onto a single platform.”

Outcome and Implications

The adoption and continuous use of ASPEN Service Shop is a clear indication of the success of the ServiceNow implementation. Every month the platform processes around 4,000 requests for access to SAP, and approximately 90,000 incidents. “Our internal customers manage millions of requests, incidents, searches, and orders through our global ASPEN Service Shop every year,” says Witherspoon. “ServiceNow provides Adidas with an incredibly powerful platform that is capable of underpinning our entire global service management operation for tens of thousands of users.”

Challenges

• • Internal service delivery satisfaction and user experience needed to be improved using more effective processes
• • Multiple legacy IT services spread across disparate systems with a lack of overall transparency into activities

ServiceNow solutions selected:

• • IT Service Management
• • Change Management
• • Incident Management
• • Configuration Management (CMDB)
• • IT Hardware Asset Management
• • HR Service Management
• • Social IT
• • Knowledge Management
• • Financial Service Management
• • Problem Management

Despite the huge volume of requests and incidents running across the Now Platform, the Service Management team has complete visibility into Service Shop activity, through sophisticated dashboards. The team can analyze key data around utilization of the portal to prioritize improvements, such as traffic levels, the most popular requests, navigation paths, and where users drop off. The results have been impressive. The mean time to resolution of incidents has reduced from 36 hours to six hours and 40% of tickets are resolved in less than a day.

Additionally, 70% of Adidas employees use self-serve rather than contact the IT department, which has enabled IT staff to move 30% of their time to non-supportrelated work. And satisfaction with the new self-service portal is on the rise as well. The Net Promoter Score rating is now 89.1

Quotes

“Before ServiceNow, IT Service Management was often and widely viewed as another cumbersome process causing an unnecessary overhead to the organisation, I always believed that with the right partner we could create an enterprise-wide platform for the delivery of all business processes and today, because of a terrific collaboration with ServiceNow, IT Service Management is viewed as a catalyst for transformation.” Said - Daniel Witherspoon, Senior Service Manager at Adidas AG