 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Jeff Frick, our co-host. This is Knowledge 17, hashtag no17. Jim Hebb is here. He's the advisory director for People and Change at KPMG, and he's here with Nate Channel, the enabling technology leader, JM Smucker and company, Systems Integrator, customer, gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having us. So let's hear the story. JM Smucker, you told me off camera that you just started in November, right? Right, we went live in November. What, take us back to that decision point where you said, hey, we need to do something here. What was that like? Well, I guess so. We were asked by the CHRO of Smucker to look into a current state assessment of their HR organization, and from that, one of the things we discovered was that, the company is a family-owned company, had grown organically over the years, had a really family type of environment, and while that is a big selling point for the company, it also resulted in a really more relaxed approach to delivering HR services, so. Love the vocation. Everybody's here. I love the vocation. Relaxed approach. Relaxed approach, so essentially, if you were an employer manager and you need help from HR, you had to know who to go to, so you had to have a name, you had to go find them. If they weren't the right person, then you got passed to the next person. Certainly, there was no way to record, track, have a collaborative sort of tool to use for HR service requests. There was no way to report on information related to where things stand. Employees couldn't see where their service requests are. There was email, phone call, stopped by the desk, so that was a gap that we thought if you really wanted to transform the HR organization and really ratchet up the level of service, we needed to do something different. A lot of tribal knowledge, but now you're in IT, is that correct? I'm actually in HR. You are in HR, okay. All right, so is that where you guys started? You started in HR? So I actually joined the company a little less than a year ago, so the project was already underway when I came in, and yes, I did start in HR, and I think that it's coming into the organization, kind of seeing it where it was when I came in, and how everything was kind of fractured because we had gone through a lot of acquisitions, and that's how we grew, and we grew very quickly. Nothing was really consolidated, so seeing this transformation has really been fantastic. But did you guys have ITSM installed, or no? No. Okay, so the company started at HR? Which is unusual, right? Yeah, what do you say? So it started with HR, and from there, they have now decided to adopt the ITSM platform that are going live in a month or so, I think. Yes. Right, so it's really interesting that they started at HR. So tell us about the implementation, how did it go? I mean, a lot of people will share with us that it's sometimes very complex to implement, you chose a partner to obviously reduce the complexity, share the risk. Yeah, so it felt very fast for us. So from an IT perspective, we're not prone to doing anything agile. So I think having that agile development lifecycle come in was a shock to the system. So it put us into the position where we had to really focus on what we wanted and what we needed very quickly. And we were able to do that, and I think we put something in place that will benefit us in the future. And I think it's benefiting us now. We've transformed our organization. And how did you get it in? Were things just breaking? Or how did you get the opportunity to provide the initiative to bring in kind of this agile new tool? So it was really part of a broader HR transformation that we were doing with the company. So we were looking at everything from top to bottom, their entire HR operating model, their HR org structure, all of the HR processes, all of the HR technology. So we were concurrently doing a workday implementation with them, building a new shared services center, looking at their entire North American model. So as part of that, this was just a natural piece of the puzzle that needed to be added. So a lot of people are confused and ServiceNow is constantly trying to explain to people what we don't compete with, with workday. So, but talking to the practitioner, where does workday leave off and ServiceNow pick up? If I'm an employee of Smucker, what do I interface with them? Am I talking to ServiceNow? Am I talking to workday, both? So actually our design, we have the portal in place. We have the HR service portal, and that's really our gateway for our employees. So it's part of ServiceNow, but it leads them into workday. And a lot of our employees associate those two as one. So they think if they're having a problem or anything like that, they need to access something. They go through HR home, but they turn and they're going right into workday. It's an HR portal to them. Right, exactly. And they don't really know or care what's at the back end. Exactly. Nor should they really. Nor should they. And that was presumably was the design point. Right, right, right. Again, not always common. Right, you hear different stories of different stovepipes, but you seem to have some success with this approach. We have. I think we always try to take it from the perspective of what does the employee manager need and how do they want to interact with HR? So it's not about, HR often has more of an insular approach to where we're thinking compensation or benefits or providing this type of function. Employees and managers come and say, I have an issue and I need help with it. So they don't really need to know if this is copper benefits. If they say I have an issue with my paycheck, it might be a benefit deduction. It might be an incorrect calculation from payroll. It might be something related to a retirement plan. So they don't need to figure that out and have to find where they need to go. They should just be able to come to HR and get help right from the start. So onboarding is the classic example. How has that, as a relatively new employee, how has it affected the onboarding process? So we are still kind of hashing through onboarding right now. We're really focusing on the workday side to get everything kind of ironed out perfectly before we truly bring service now as a part of that into it. But from any perspective where there's any kind of problem, we're directing our future employees to utilize the tool as possible. And take us through the project. Like when did it start and how long did it take? Well, it actually started with an RFP process. So we facilitated that. So we had five different providers that we were helping smucker evaluate. Methodology, approach, functionality, technical alignment, business, cultural alignment, cost. And from that RFP process, service now came out on top. So that was the selection point that was earlier in 2016, first quarter 2016. Because we were doing an entire transformation, we staged everything in kind of a sequential order in terms of what we were doing with workday, shared services, redesigned of operating model, all of that good stuff. And we ended up, as Nate said, launching, doing a soft launch right after Thanksgiving for the service now platform. Full launch with workday service now, service center, everything on December 14th. And the business impact so far as early days, but so far in what's expected? So I mean, it was completely different from anything that we're used to. So I mean. In a good way. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It was fantastic. You know, I think our employee population really jumped on board very quickly. So, you know, instead of following that traditional HR, you know, pick up the phone or send an email, they're calling a service center. You know, and they're following up on cases instead of following up on emails. So yeah, I think we've definitely kind of consolidated all of that into the service now platform. All right, Gents, we got to leave it there. Yet another happy customer. It gets, it actually doesn't get boring after all. I love to hear the stories and because, because things change so much. It used to be ITSM and now we're talking, you know, lines of business, et cetera. So Gents, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you, thank you. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there. Everybody, we're back with our next guest. TheCuberLive from Service Now Knowledge 17. Right back.