When a piece of equipment on one German manufacturer’s assembly line did not work properly, it took 30 minutes on average to request support—costing the company as much as to €50,000 in calculatory downtime per incident.
The German manufacturer turned to Deloitte and ServiceNow to modernise its shop floor service management to reduce downtime and generate savings.
Deloitte and ServiceNow designed and launched an Operational Technology Service Management (OTSM) pilot in one of the manufacturer’s plants, creating a one-stop-shop ticketing system that:
- Established a single point of contact and end-to-end visibility across the company’s plant management, office floor and shop floor employees.
- Met shop floor employees where they were—both physically on the line and based on their digital skillsets—with an easy-to-use user interface (UX) and simple, single-word prompts for ticket creation.
- Provided a knowledge base that offered quick fixes to common problems throughout the ticketing process, empowering shop floor employees to get tools back up and running faster—and without outside support. This “shift left” approach helped reduce downtime and the workload of local and central IT.
- Automated the prioritisation of critical tasks based on two criteria, which the foreperson selects from a simple pull-down menu when opening the ticket, to ensure that equipment with the highest impact on downtime was fixed first.
- Consolidated a complex web of partially managed solutions, channels and modifications.
The solution drastically improved and accelerated the resolution of tickets that could be solved on-site. The routeing of tickets to central IT, a process that once took an average of 30 minutes, was streamlined to take a maximum of just six minutes. And within central IT, tickets are now automatically forwarded directly to the correct solver group per a qualified selection within ServiceNow’s first-level support (L1), saving additional time and effort.
The 80% improvement in routeing speed alone would generate tens of thousands of euros in savings per critical ticket. And, if rolled out across the company’s approximately 30 plants, it could expect millions in annual savings.
Watch how a 230-year-old manufacturing leader reinvented its OTSM operations with a one-stop-shop ticketing system.
The challenge
Manufacturing today looks nothing like it did when this German-based company opened up shop in the 18th century. What started as a water-powered mill had transformed into a state-of-the-art production facility; one that wasn’t just using automation technologies and mobile robotics tools—it was making them.
While the company was designing, manufacturing and using cutting-edge OT, the process of maintaining production IT on its own shop floor fell behind. Why? Largely because it was using the same maintenance processes used to support office IT in the highly complex—and downtime-sensitive—shop floor.
When an office user had trouble opening a document, for example, the 30-minutes or more it took to raise a ticket through central IT was frustrating, but tolerable. However, the shop floor—and the enterprise at large—could not afford the same wait time when a critical piece of OT was stalled due to an IT matter.
Moreover, the convergence of IT and OT in production had resulted in increasingly complex machines. Unlike office IT, a maintenance issue on the shop floor often required the collaboration of specialists from different parts of the business, all executed in the right order and at a rapid cadence.
Yet these complex alignments and workflows were being manually orchestrated. Line workers had to physically call for support—either by phone or directly out onto the shop floor if IT maintenance was within earshot—and hope that the right specialists were available at the right time. And that they were able to overcome a previous lack of collaboration to suddenly work well together under pressure.
The company’s on-site manufacturing IT, central IT and OT teams were historically siloed and had few opportunities to collaborate in the past. Within their individual departments, all of which operated under different processes and key performance indicators, IT and OT team members lacked common ways of working, adding further strain to their already complex, time-sensitive shared projects.