Giant Eagle Keeps IT Fresh with ServiceNow

Headquarters Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Industry Retail

Company Size Approximately 36,000

Services Rendered Phase 1 ServiceNow Implementation

Giant Eagle is one of the largest family-operated companies in the US. Founded in 1931, the multi-format food, fuel and pharmacy retailer serves more than four million customers across western Pennsylvania, north central Ohio, northern West Virginia, Maryland and Indiana at its Giant Eagle, GetGo and Market District locations.

Challenges

Currently, Giant Eagle is in the middle of a multi-year project to move its data centers to the cloud. As part of this initiative, the retailer recognized the need to have a firm grip on its asset inventory from both a hardware and software perspective. In its legacy environment, the IT team didn’t have active or formal inventory processes – everything was contained in a collection of spreadsheets and documents and even the knowledge of individuals – and they knew this would need to change in order for Giant Eagle to be successful in the cloud.

“We had no CMDB [Configuration Management Database] and foresaw significant challenges in planning our data center move to the cloud without configuration management in place,” Scott Petrak, Senior Director, IT Transformation and Global Sourcing at Giant Eagle, explains. “We were also running a change management process that was marginally effective, but inefficient and labor intensive.”

Solution

Upon recognizing these opportunities for improvement, the Giant Eagle IT organization began to develop a roadmap for what it wanted to achieve from a process standpoint.

“Working with a partner, we looked at our IT Service Management environment with an ITIL eyeglass and identified a series of short-term, mid-term and long-term needs. Our strategic needs dictated that we get our arms around configuration management early on, and we knew we would need to update our change management processes too in order to keep everything current,” Petrak says.

Based on this roadmap, Giant Eagle began to evaluate possible solutions to fulfill its needs. Petrak shares that his team consulted resources from industry analysts Gartner and Forrester in order to compare factors like market position and functionality.

“All of the ratings and assessments led us straight to ServiceNow. We were really focused on flexibility and scalability, and we knew ServiceNow was the right match for that strategy,” he continues.

Next, Giant Eagle knew it would need assistance from a partner to properly implement ServiceNow, bring its team up to speed on ITIL best practices and help it execute its roadmap. The retailer evaluated the partner who helped it develop its roadmap and select ServiceNow as well as several other market leaders identified by industry reports.

Ultimately, a recommendation from ServiceNow itself led Giant Eagle to Accenture. “We very quickly realized a very high attention to our requirements by Accenture when they were the first to engage us on site. We also appreciated the fact that Accenture invested a lot of time to really understand our needs, which truly showed when they delivered their proposal for work. Once they understood our challenges with process design and change leadership, they immediately suggested that we also engage Cask as their partner,” Petrak adds.

With the Accenture and Cask teams on board, Giant Eagle began its Phase 1 implementation of ServiceNow, which included configuration management (including Discovery) solutions, change management and several custom integrations.

Results

Giant Eagle went live with its ServiceNow solution in April 2015. Petrak reports that the implementation has created a much more disciplined approach to impact analysis and collaboration with respect to proposed changes and significantly increased visibility into the organization’s asset inventory.

One of the biggest benefits Giant Eagle has realized since adopting ServiceNow is the ability to be proactive around change management. By introducing a best practice change process and complete CMDB, the implementation has helped the retailer achieve its goals around modernizing processes and better understanding process efficiency and impact. As a result, the Giant Eagle IT organization can now be proactive with technology in order to prevent incidents from occurring in the first place. This proactivity not only creates a smoother experience for IT and end users, but also allows customer-facing employees to provide the best experience possible for shoppers.

According to Petrak, the automation provided by ServiceNow has also made a huge difference for Giant Eagle in terms of ensuring all systems and information are aligned and keeping people informed of changes and updates. Additionally, integrating ServiceNow with backend systems has allowed Giant Eagle to make ServiceNow its system of engagement and reduce the number of individual tools users need to manage.

Petrak also shares that the reaction from users and management alike has been very positive, with both groups praising the new system’s ease of use and clear communication.

“People have appreciated the additional level of communication they get via workflows from ServiceNow. From a process design standpoint, we’ve re-engineered our change management processes to adhere to ITIL best practices and had strong buy-in because we asked management to participate in the design,” Petrak shares.

Overall, the Giant Eagle team viewed the implementation as a hands-down success. Following organizational change management best practices introduced by Cask, including regular communication via a newsletter about what changes to expect and the impact of those changes, Giant Eagle achieved immediate adoption of both the new processes and the new system.

Across the board, Petrak attributes this success in large part to the guidance provided by Accenture and Cask.

“Without Cask’s process guidance, we might be still wandering around the ITIL mountain. The work we did with Cask to establish strong process designs and their guidance on change leadership and ITIL were the foundation for our success. When Accenture took the baton from Cask, we lost no momentum. There was never this ‘throw it over the wall and hope someone catches it’ moment. The Accenture project manager helped our project manager keep a constant finger on project pulse, proactively mitigating risks and resolving issues. Accenture’ senior account manager touched base with us bi-weekly to ensure alignment on tactical direction and the Accenture technical team devoted significant effort toward knowledge transfer to our internal team,” he explains. “I’ve worked on a lot of projects over the years, and this was the one where everything went right.”

The Giant Eagle team is actively evaluating opportunities to expand its use of ServiceNow, with an interest in potentially moving ServiceNow into its retail operations.

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