 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship production. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, the signal here at ServiceNow Knowledge 16 is the extension of service management across the enterprise. Brian Andrews is here, he's the Vice President of IT, Stone Brewing, CUBE alum. Brian, great to see you again. Thank you, it's great to be here, nice to see you guys again. Another Knowledge, a lot happening, good energy this year again, you know. It's my third Knowledge. How's this week been for you? Oh, it's a blast, yeah, incredible energy and growth and excitement from the company, the partners, it's been fun. So third Knowledge, you've had service now for two years, right, and so what, the first Knowledge was sort of coming and kicking the tires and talking to other customers, is this stuff real? Exactly, last year we got to speak and this year we're in the customer showcase, which is new one of four and telling our story about what we did and meeting other customers and partners, it's fun. So give us the update, what's the story? You guys are growing, expanding? Yeah, yeah, so Stone Brewing were the 10th largest craft beer company in the country and growing double digit growth. So yeah, we're now opening a second brewery in Richmond, Virginia and a third in Berlin, Germany doing two at the same time, which is pretty nuts for us to do both. So it's a large focus for the company. We're actually the first American craft brew company to open a brewery anywhere in Europe and to operate it. And we're going right to Berlin and... In Germany, how less? I know, I know. Right into the fire, I mean. I know. Now talk about that business decision to go into Germany, I mean, beer central. I know, I know. Well, a craft beer starting to really take off in Europe and we were looking at sites all through Europe and really fell in love with this property in Berlin. It's an old gas works facility, brick, a neat place for garden inside. It's just really a neat place, but the craft beer movements has a lot of energy there. And we feel like that can be our European hub to brew and distribute throughout Europe. So it's a great spot, a great place to come visit and spend the day and enjoy the gardens. And that's gonna be a lot of fun. We have a really a large bistro going in as well. So it's gonna be a place you'll want to stay and hang all day. Yeah. Eat pretzels. That's right, that's right. And how does, I'm just curious, we're talking offline, kind of the German purity laws or their special, Germany is a very special place to do business for a whole lot of reasons. HR reasons and data privacy reasons and this, that and the other. From the brewery perspective, we hear about their purity laws. Do you have to follow those? Is your new animal as an American craft beer manufacturer? How does that work? Well, so most of our beer that we do, the core beers, they do fit right into that. Our stone IPA and arrogant bastards, they fit in. But we do a lot that do not fit in because we add in espresso or tangerine or good stuff like that. So we're purposely going to be knocking down that bureaucracy and being rebellious. We had a event last week where we served only beers that did not comply with the law. True to our culture, we're rebels and it's exciting for us. I have to say, I mean, German beer is special. I've consumed a lot of German beer in my day and somehow the next day, you just feel great. Absolutely, absolutely. Is that the experience with stone? Yeah, yeah, it's going to be, you know, I think new to get the strong, you know, bitter forward, hot forward IPAs that we serve will be different. That's awesome. Now you guys, you were saying, brought in service now from the business side first. We did. And then IT, but you led that acquisition. Talk about that. Two years ago, we were looking at putting in a set of systems for the business. Each group had their own needs and they had selected systems they wanted to bring in. The brew ops maintenance was the number one that we needed to serve as a use case. So the, you know, demand was really growing for our beer as it's been. We need to keep up with the demand and so we can't have the brewing equipment down. We were turning to a 24-7 operation in the brewery. Anytime a piece of equipment was down, we're not getting beer to our fans. We're not serving our customers. So we needed something for plan maintenance to keep that equipment rolling. Facilities wanted something as well for maintaining the facilities and HVAC units and all that. Safety wanted something for reporting incidents. They were all those groups for outlook and Excel. And so they needed a system. They didn't have one. We had some project management needs in our marketing group. And of course, IT wanted a great system too. So we looked at those and said, we can collapse all these down into one system with service now. Because in the end, they had a common set of requirements. They wanted workflow and reporting and visibility, work order management. So we did some proof of concepts and they bought in and we deployed service now to the business first because they had nothing. At least IT had something. It was antiquated, but we had something. So we served them father's children. Exactly. We served them first. And so year one was all about putting those platforms in place, the crawl, walk, and then year two, we were optimizing. And now we report some, we had some terrific results that have come out now by using it. Now you got to triple it and take it overseas. So then you go straight to the run. That's right. That's right. And fly. So as you grow, what role do you see service now playing? I mean, have you been able to sort of sense or measure the productivity impacts? Yeah, we've had some great results that come out of this. So our brewing department, as I said, they need to keep that equipment rolling. Any downtime was hurting us. We cut the downtime in half by using planned maintenance. And so we use not only the corrective work orders, but planning. So we have 2,200 items from the brewery and packaging in our CMDB, and we run planned maintenance against those. Now half of the work orders that we're completing are planned preventive in nature. Those were a very small percentage earlier. It was more reactive and corrective. Moving to planned, we're more on top of things, more proactive and the equipment's up and running longer. So you mentioned the CMDB. So you've got a single CMDB? Are you getting there? We do. Yeah, a single CMDB for all the brewing and packaging equipment. And it's all has a nice data hierarchy so we can know that it's the Escondido brewery and it's Brewhouse One and it's the Louder Ton and that has valves and pumps and sensors. Now those items might be used in other pieces of equipment too. So we can put those and assign them to different items in the CMDB, but it's all in there and organized and we can see how we're doing on cost control and when we need to replace equipment or maintain it. And on the preventive, is it implementing suggestive best practices by the manufacturer of those components or did you guys come up with your own kind of maintenance schedule based on operating experience, et cetera? Yeah, primarily from the manufacturer. So we have those as knowledge articles as well. But we have our own procedures that we also put in there and those are put through in the work order so the technicians can see those. And then one thing that's really nice is when we have downtime in the brewery for maybe the brewing team is doing training. We can see all the plan maintenance coming up and accelerate some so we may have something for next week. We can move it up by a few days or something we may want to delay so we can have less downtime and group it together and do that maintenance all at once. What kind of modifications have you, did you have to make or did you have to make bringing in service now? Well, we were a little on the bleeding edge in some cases a couple of years ago as we were putting in the facilities maintenance and the plan maintenance. So that was just starting to come out with service now. So we had to build some custom tables and we wanted to make sure it made sense for the context. So we had crafting assets and crafting systems, those kinds of things. So the business content made sense. But those are now coming out of the box so we're starting to pull back on the customization. So it was not too bad, a few things. Now as we extended to facilities and safety, we wanted to make sure we could tag items if there's a leaking valve or exposed wire, those kinds of things. We can tag it as a facilities issue, a brewing ops issue, but also note it as a safety issue. Safety is big at stone. We want to make sure it's a safe environment for our team. We've cut injuries in half by having a focus on people and training the processes but also having this tool now to make all the issues visible in real time. So we're having a 100% increase in safety issues reported to us so we can see more, they were out there before and weren't being reported or lost in email and Excel. So we're seeing those now, more proactive fixing and cut injuries in half. We're really proud of that. Talk about the process behind that because we always talk about the people process technology, technology's one piece, a fool with a tool, blah blah blah, all the little idioms. But you're using ServiceNow as a platform to enter those incidents, those safety incidents but somebody's got to actually do that, right? So is it the person who got injured and what's the incentive for them doing that or explain the process behind that? Well, safety is woven into our culture. So we want to make sure day one, everyone knows that's critical for us. We want to leave as safe, as healthy as you were when you started your day. So what we have is that form is available through our service catalog along with IT requests, facilities requests, there's a safety incident you can report, those come through from the team member that saw it. So it could be the person that experienced it or someone who saw something and maybe they're working the packaging line, they see something that could be an issue. So those could be sent through easily on a tablet or from their workstations and then the safety manager gets alerted to that, works to cues, runs their reports, passes it to who's in charge, maybe fixed by the facilities team or an engineer. So they pass those tickets along. That's a real plus for us having that on one system because originally the brewing folks wanted their system they were used to and that was different than what facilities had used before or safety in their previous companies but bringing it all together in one, they can pass those tickets along and track it a lot easier in one system. And you're able to identify commonalities and then attack like they showed this morning's keynote with the big red box. That's right. And so you were able to drill down into those and then try to put in new processes to remediate those problems. And of course all the categories, what types of injuries are happening and you can focus on the top ones. Is it slip and falls or lifting or forklift and those tie into then training and certification and getting people recertified. So it starts to tie to the learning management program as well. But the other thing we hear over and over is that in the implementation and execution with service now in department A and then it integrates over to BC and D and they start to say, hey, we want to do this too. Are you seeing a proliferation beyond kind of what your core initial delivery was? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, people are, there's a conga line we like to say, people waiting to get on. Our next is going to be project management for getting a new beer released. So that's a seven month process or so to get from concept to actually getting the beer out the door. And so we're going to be putting that all in service now for project management and having those tasks visible for everyone involved. It's a really cross functional effort to get a beer released and many different groups have to collaborate and making that visible in a single place, single plan, having dependencies in there. And what we love about the project management suite is that the work being done is in the project plan but it's also the tasks that can assign to people to do the work. And if they're getting production support or incidents that come through, they can see that and they're my work keys along with their project work all in one place. So we're really excited about putting in project management to come. What are you using today for project management? Well, for that new beer process, it's a lot of Excel spreadsheets and email, some document word docs, those kinds of things. But we have MS project and project server that we're using for construction projects. But there's a lot of manual work that goes with that. Will you and have you? Let me go start with have you. When you brought in service now, were you able to retire some systems? Did you get rid of stuff? Well, for IT, we had a system, it was the track it system from BMC. So that's one that we wanted to replace. So we're rolling it out for IT was a big win. And that's now gotten pretty far we're doing incidents and change. We'd like to get into problem and really start to mature that. But we've put the business first, so IT's taking the backseat on resources, but it's definitely, we're well past where we were before. So we'll be putting the assets in the database for IT as we've done for the brewing equipment and the facilities equipment and really build out IT ahead. But MS project will definitely be retired as we move. And most of the other ones, the media department has a system they used called ASANA and they use that for project management. That will also go when we have the new beer system getting launched with project management. How do you deal with the organization or is there organizational friction? People say I want to hang on to the last user. Yeah. Yeah, the stretcher. Right, right. How do you deal with that? Well, so most of the folks were using Outlook and Excel. So those are pretty easy. They really, they needed something and didn't have it. So those were easier wins. But there's some, the change management is interesting because when you look in the magic quadrant, what's the best maintenance management systems or project management systems and service now yet isn't out there, right? Because it's the best in service management by getting people to see that it can also be a terrific system for project management or maintenance is a bit of a stretch, right? So you have to show them really, well, what is it you really need? What are those requirements that let me show you? So we've done some proof of concepts and that's been helpful to get people to see as well and believe because they see it as an IT system also when they go look it up, but we show them what we're doing and they get it. It's exciting. So we're talking last year, we talked about time to value and we sort of joked time to beer. Right. Have you been able to actually quantify that? Do you see faster time to beer? Well, it's like having that brewing equipment up and running has been big for us. And cutting that in half of the downtime, we're getting the beer out the door. So that has been the biggest win for us really. I think with this seven month new beer release process, although cutting that time down isn't the number one driver of that. It's more about getting it visible and the collaboration of people working together. I think that that will be pleasantly surprised with how that's gonna decrease. So give us the roadmap over the next 12 months. What are you gonna be working on? What's exciting you? Yeah, so a couple of big things. So we'll be doing that new beer project management. We're also gonna be integrating with our ERP system. So for the team that's getting those maintenance requests in for the brewery, they wanna get those parts consumed from our ERP system, get the parts in, we can track the total cost of the maintenance that's going on, but also trigger reorders for the parts based on min values in our ERP. So that'll be a nice integration. We'll do the new beer and then we wanna get IT mature through the IT service management. And we're seeing so many great things with that, performance analytics, that's exciting to us because we're getting a lot of data, good operational reports, but we'd love to get some of that predictive business intelligence coming. So those are a couple areas we're really looking at this year. And I think also making a ticket advantage of that, the tools to make the user interface really nice looking will be great. So our service portal, service catalog has a lot of great items on there, but it doesn't look that great yet. So we're gonna make it look slick with some of the new tools and I guess Helsinki's got some really good tools for doing that. So you use service now for that UI, UX? Yeah. And you say bringing forth parts of Helsinki? Yeah, yeah, so we're upgrading later this summer. We're moving to Geneva in a couple of weeks and then we'll be really focusing later in the summer and making that service catalog look good. Now, Stone's got some beautiful imagery. We have great shots of the beer and our facilities, really great external when people see Stone, has really just terrific images and videos. We wanna make that look as good on the inside as it does on the outside for a fan. So people come in and join the company and see how good we are on the inside too. That's important to us. So who does that beautification? Do you have a UI, UX team that does that or is it just bunch of your guys? Pretty small team, only 17 in IT that take care of a thousand team members. So we have, we're stretched pretty thin. We have a terrific system administrator who also does development and UI and another gentleman that works on our websites. So I think collaborating together and the tools that are available, I think we'll be able to make it look good internally. And we've had some great partners as well. Awesome, yeah. All right, Brian, well, listen, thanks for coming back to theCUBE and sharing your stories. We love having Stone brewing on anytime, so really appreciate it. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate being here. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. theCUBE will be back right after this Knowledge 16, Vegas. Right back.