Highlights

• Automated asset delivery using a single-source-of-truth, centralised inventory
• Improved visibility into IT assets to promote informed decision-making
• Streamlined order management, shipping, tracking, and reporting
• Tangible cost savings with improved inventory utilisation and effective procurement

Overview

As one of the leading healthcare services providers and healthcare plan providers, Providence Health and Services is an amalgamation of 117000 caregivers, 36000 nurses, and 34000 physicians, serving over 28.5 million patients and providing coverage for over 2.6 million lives. Given their distributed presence over 7 states, 51 hospitals, and 1100 clinics, it was imperative that their systems were robust, reliable, and flexible enough for swift deployment, such as in the case of Providence’s COVID-19 response initiatives.  

Client’s Requirements

Given the nature of its operations, Providence Health and Services needed constant, consistent, and reliable connectivity across its network. This was principally because of the sheer volume of patients being catered to, and the extensive services being provided, including family medicine, internal medicine, paediatrics, obstetrics/gynaecology, dermatology, and other specialties. These sprawling operations needed to be agile and responsive, and placed a considerable demand on IT Operations. Providence Health and Services wanted more visibility into their IT assets and their inventory. They also needed their procurement and distribution operations to be streamlined and optimized for speed and cost efficiency.  

Their key requirements were:

1. To have a centralised IT Asset inventory that gives a single pane of glass view into the inventory and it’s utilisation

2. Improve procurement strategy and decision-making to help reduce cost and improve efficiency

3. Improve the asset requisition lifecycle from service request to delivery

4. Integrate Service Request Management tasks and performance within ServiceNow

5. Improve Asset utilization to reduce unnecessary inventory and locked capital

Providence wanted a partner who could help them modernise their IT Asset Management function and integrate the Asset Management operations within ServiceNow.  

Solution

Velocis recognised that the Providence requirement of processing asset requests within ServiceNow required the asset inventory and service request management workflows to also be integrated within ServiceNow. To this effect, we implemented a solution to be the single source of truth for all IT Asset lifecycle stages. Key features of the solution included:  

• Integrating all IT assets into a centralised inventory
• Creating an asset catalogue that users can order from
• Simplifying the service request into a self-service ecommerce style portal
• Real-time inventory status with order management, shipping, and tracking  
• Daily reports to allow efficient visibility and oversight

Key highlights of the solution:

• All-encompassing IT Asset Management  
• End-to-end automated and integrated workflows for order management, processing, and delivery
• Real-time visibility into inventory and order status  
• Single Source of Truth to enable analytics

Business Outcomes

The biggest outcome delivered to Providence was the ability to identify the trends in the asset requests and how they affect the inventory, thus enabling an efficient data-driven procurement strategy. Additionally:  

• Procurement and supply of IT devices and peripherals was simplified and made hassle-free for the end user
• Centralised asset inventory directly translated into faster order processing due to real-time, accurate inventory information, thus reducing processing times.  
• Real-time inventory data allowed for procurement strategies such as just-in-time to be implemented, thus reducing costs and cost to capital on unutilised inventory
• Integration of all IT Asset Management supply chain activities into ServiceNow enabled automation and streamlining, thus reducing human touchpoints, and significantly improving user experience

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