The central back office of the client has reached a size where processing requests made via email has reached its limit. It is no longer transparent who is processing what and for how long, resulting in a lack of oversight that can crucially hinder capacity planning. Using email for handling requests can lead to missing details, needs to be reviewed twice, and historization is missing for some cases leading to inefficiency and reduced service quality. The leadership decided to solve this problem with the implementation of a ticketing tool.

Parts of the business process management lifecycle framework are applied to optimize the order-to-cash process. The process identification is defined by the client as the order-to-cash process. The “as-is” process was discovered by conducting interviews with the two stakeholders. The ServiceNow functionalities were explored. The process is analyzed with the value-adding analysis and further issues are recorded. The functionalities of the tool are compared to the requirements.The last step was modeling the “to-be” process based on the tool’s functionalities and the optimization steps.

The analysis and the issue register showed that non-value adding steps are performed in several subprocesses. Most of the processes lack of visibility and communication between the professional and the central back office. Moreover, some secondary subprocesses do not have a defined procedure and are not aligned with the core order-to-cash process. The functionality of ServiceNow can eliminate unnecessary steps and enables transparency in the process. The defined workflows will be visible to the central back office and the professional, enhancing the visibility of the progress and thus communication. Furthermore, the secondary processes will be incorporated into the “to-be” main process. Based on clients feedback, the main benefit will be a more efficient order-to-cash process reducing time spent on reviewing and checking tasks, repeatedly done in the “as-is” process. The visible workflow enhances the transparency of the process and dramatically improves communication. Lastly, the ticketing tool will provided an overview of the requests and the performance of the CBO employees, enabling capacity planning which was not possible in the current setup.