 organized ourselves from a functional IT discipline, which was very siloed. And. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Knowledge 16 everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is SiliconANGLE's flagship product. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Chris Wensel is here as the ITSM manager at Yazaki. You may not have heard of Yazaki, but your car has. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Well thank you, it's a pleasure. So tell us a little bit about Yazaki. Big company, been around for a while. Yeah, Yazaki is a global organization. We manufacture electrical systems for vehicles. So chances are your car has either a component or like a fuse box or a wiring system that we've produced in your car. Yeah, I mean, your industry is just transforming. Obviously with Tesla, coming in and disrupting things, changing the whole experience, the maintenance experience. You're seeing Uber disrupting, you're seeing investments in companies like Lyft. What's going on at the industry level? And how do you play in that mix? Well, we're a supplier and so we definitely have to react to our customers' needs and what we're seeing in the auto industry is that there's a shift now towards electrical vehicles. Electric vehicles, of course, operate on different voltages in a traditional vehicle. So a lot of our power and cabling has to be scaled up for that. In addition, what we're finding out is that a lot of the West Coast car companies have a slightly different expectation in terms of design to delivery than you would see from a traditional manufacturer out of Detroit or elsewhere. So we're finding that as an IT department that we have to react a little more quickly to get our engineers up to speed to be able to service our customer. And you're not a small ship, right? Looking online, 70,000 plus employees. So being able to service that population, not an insignificant task. So what are some of the things you've been doing using service now to help make your job a little easier? That's true. In Duzaki, we're organized into three different regions. I mainly work with what I call the America's region. Our IT department there services about 46,000 employees. You can imagine there's a lot of turnover. And so we're dealing with trying to find ways to automate that process so that we can make the onboarding experience more quickly and also improve the quality of that experience. So talk a little bit about your journey with service now and what impact that's had as you're getting pressured for more speed, more agility, maybe new apps, et cetera. When did you start with service now? Well, it's interesting you say that. It's actually been a long story. We looked at service now probably six years ago and we had selected it as a choice we wanted to move forward with, but then we had the automotive downturn. So we kind of went on hold. And when we came out of that, we decided to give service now a chance to improve the value. We wanted to do something that was kind of soup to nuts, kind of low scale, but give us the ability to understand whether we could really truly automate. And in doing so, we chose onboarding. And so we took the process of creating user accounts and all the email systems and Skype for business and made that an automated process and eliminated a lot of the hands-on from our administrators. So talk about, so how did you do it before? So you had a big checklist. You had the onboarding checklist. Where does that live? Is it lives in a spreadsheet or maybe in stickies? Talk about the before and the after. Sure, so we would literally get a in our old legacy ticketing system. You know, I noticed it said Johnny's arriving in two days. Please create accounts like Bob. And so then we'd have to figure, okay, what did Bob have? And then, you know, between Bob. Make it same. Hopefully it is. You're Bob, we're Bob. Right, which Bob? Smith. Yeah, then basically our administrators would have to go out and figure out what did Bob have for access and then go through the different systems, figure out where John's going to work, make sure that they provision their email box like at the right location. Cause you know, network issues. We don't wanna, you know, have you working in Mexico and have your email box up in Canada. So having to orchestrate all that and it took time and we'd make mistakes. We'd forget, right? We used the checklist you mentioned and forget to do one of the steps. And so then that would result in more calls to our help desk and obviously, you know, our internal customers would be frustrated. So we were able to automate that process. So essentially after making a couple of checks on a screen, one, two, three, accounts created in two minutes, whereas in the past it would take about 10 minutes for our folks to do so. You know, what about kind of the interdepartmental communication between your department and HR? And again, there's probably a whole another rash of things that could go wrong within that communication pattern as well around Bob. Yeah, so we built integrations between our HR system and ServiceNow in a way that once HR pulls the trigger to hire somebody, that information is automatically transferred into the ServiceNow system and shows up as a service request for our help desk. They can vet the information and once it's been vetted, essentially pull the trigger to automate the account creation. So what's the execution time go from what it was to what it is now? We, in the past, maybe take three or four days, real time to get an account created. And now if the person is hired, or officially hired on a Thursday, Friday morning they'll have all their accounts set up. And the actual time to do the account is again, about two to four minutes. And the quality, the error rate has gone way down, I presume. Yeah, very much so. Now we don't forget the steps. Yeah, you were in the ticket treadmill as Dave Wright called it yesterday, and so you're off the ticket treadmill, right? We're trying to get there, and just to go slightly off topic from the onboarding, we also introduced the service catalog portion of ServiceNow, and what our focus has really been is trying to put the items in there that our users asked for. Traditionally in the past, they would enter those as break fix tickets. They'd put in as a break fix ticket, I need a new laptop, and we're now trying to move those requests into our catalog and use the workflows to move that to the people that can actually do the work as opposed to have it all kind of funneled through the help desk and create a bottleneck there. So there's clearly been a productivity, a positive productivity impact at your organization. What do you do with that extra time? What are people doing? Well, it's not hard to find things for them to do. Actually, we're growing, so our issue is always, how do we support our internal organization as we grow with the same cost? So we're always under pressure to remain competitive that way. So this really just helps us maintain our efficiencies. So it's some cost avoidance. The requirement on finding and hiring new people has been somewhat lessened. Yes, yes. And how about the impact on your end customer sentiment, their satisfaction? From what I've seen so far, I've gotten some good feedback. They enjoy using the system. They enjoy the fact that it's easy to search for items, to look. Of course, they enjoy the fact that as a hiring manager, when they bring somebody on board, that all their stuff is set up. So I think we're getting into a good win-win there. So Chris, what's next for Izaki with regard to service management? Where are you headed? Well, we have big plans. Our next implementation is going to be the change management portion. And then we'll continue on from there with problem and then asset management. Great. Well, sorry to squeeze you on the segments. We got a run, but thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, sharing your story. It was great to have you. Yeah, well, thank you. It's been a pleasure. And business is going to keep growing, not the mud up for you guys. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live at Knowledge 16 from Vegas. Right back.