Plat4mation
Maximizing the Power of ServiceNow

While working for Accenture in 2013, the trio of Elmer de Valk, Roel Schoenmakers, and Bas Tax grew enthusiastic about the untapped potential of then-emerging application platform as a service (aPaaS) cloud computing model. As progressive organizations leveraged aPaaS to swiftly build meaningful business processes through workflows, it was inevitable that other enterprises had to transform and join the platform as a service revolution. Drawing on their conviction that enterprises leveraging aPaaS will reap transformational benefits, de Valk, Tax, and Schoenmakers founded Plat4mation—with their vision statement encapsulated in the name, an amalgamation of Platform and Transformation. On their undertaking to utilize technology capability to deliver transformational benefits, Plat4mation unleashed the potential of ServiceNow as its first aPaaS specialty, at a time when ServiceNow was viewed as an ITSM tool. “Even when ServiceNow wasn’t considered aPaaS, we noticed that it was built on the foundation of aPaaS technology. We had a strong belief in this technology,” says de Valk, the managing partner and CEO of Plat4mation, the only ServiceNow Triple Gold partner in the world.

Since its inception in 2013, Plat4mation has guided its clients through the entire ServiceNow journey— starting from strategic advisory services, and project implementation, all the way through custom application development to application maintenance support and training services. In this conversation with CIO Applications, de Valk, Managing Partner & CEO, Plat4mation, explains how his company uses seasoned best practices to aid its clients to maximize the immense benefits of the ServiceNow platform.

What are the factors that led to your foray into the ServiceNow landscape?

From the beginning, we’ve believed in the power of ServiceNow. Instead of focusing on modules such as ITSM, we positioned ourselves as a platform player, from the onset. Due to our collective knowledge of the platform, we built up our technological capability and started to effectively implement all the modules that ServiceNow offers.

What is your unique value proposition with regard to ServiceNow?

We have built a couple of functional competence groups atop ServiceNow’s generic technical capabilities. We have hired proficient experts in the areas of ITSM, CSM, Governance Risk, Compliance, Project Portfolio, and IT Operations Management, to name a few. We’ve combined domain expertise with generic platform capabilities—and that’s one of the reasons we’re so successful. Besides ITSM, we also aid our clients in areas such as HR service delivery, customer and field service management, facility and enterprise service management. In the event that ServiceNow doesn’t cover an organizational function/process, we just build business workflows and applications ourselves, by calling upon our technical capability.

What are the key challenges you are able to address for your clients in the ServiceNow segment?

Our Strategic advisors and consultants focus on delivering the value associated to solving business-related challenges by adopting ITSM or IT Operations Management. When a company purchases ServiceNow, they inherit an extremely powerful platform. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Since the platform is so flexible, if you don’t utilize it wisely, you run the risk of going overboard in making changes or customizations, which actually extends the duration of projects, and would add to the running costs.

We have an implementation approach that is based on implementation accelerators, to ensure that we’re able to guide a client to seamlessly and swiftly adopt ServiceNow. Our approach is always ‘how do we make a project small enough’ as compared to some of our competitors who have a revenue-driven approach and push for projects that run for extended periods.

Could you elaborate on your best practices approach into implementing ServiceNow for clients?

The philosophy is simple. We provide “prescribed consultancy”—which entails not quizzing clients with questions, such as their vision for the platform. Instead, the consultancy approach revolves around forecasting to the client, what the process and solution would resemble. This is a flipped approach in that sense—instead of asking the client questions during the implementation approach, we provide answers. After we brief the clients on what the best practices process leads to, we ask “why wouldn’t this work for you”. That is a very powerful question to ask because it’s putting the clients on the spot and putting the burden on them to explain why ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box modules are not conducive to their business processes. Because every client is unique, there are exceptions to the Best practices that we need to configure in ServiceNow, but our approach tends to limit this work considerably. Our industrialized approach includes all the assets, such as workshops slides, testing, and training materials, which helps us to drive the investment down, while speeding up the implementation.

How important is it for Plat4mation to be recognized as a Triple Gold partner by ServiceNow?

With regards to serving our customers, we have four primary pillars—Advisory Services, Project Implementation Services, Custom Application Development Services, and Application Maintenance Services. We are able to define clients’ ServiceNow roadmaps and ensure that those roadmaps are delivered so that they will have a healthy and stable system going forward. We are proud of our partnership with ServiceNow—besides serving as a sales partner, we’re a service partner due to the substantial sub-contracting work we do for them. We also have a significant amount of trained and certified number of ServiceNow consultants on board. Add in our very high customer satisfaction score, and we managed to receive Gold status for our ServiceNow services. We’ve also been building technology and apps within the ServiceNow platform; in the area of Facility Management, for example. The investment we have made and sales we are driving with our App business is what has lead to our Gold Technology partnership as well.

Could you walk us through a customer success story wherein Plat4mation stepped in and mitigated a challenge?

This company is a very large manufacturer and provider of high-tech computer chip machines. Their existing ServiceNow platform, implemented by another partner, was heavily customized, and far away from ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box or ‘plain vanilla system.’ They weren’t leveraging the true power of ServiceNow. We stepped in. After providing preliminary advisory services, we defined their implementation roadmap. To do a phased implementation of ServiceNow, we had to connect the existing, heavily-customized ServiceNow with the vanilla one, while ensuring the data could freely flow between the two instances. We implemented automatic discovery, service maps, and ITSM processes —after building a vanilla system with our implementation accelerators—staying extremely close to out-of-the-box. Within four months, the client had a fully-operational version of ServiceNow where in they could load/ migrate users into the new version. We used one of our store applications titled Connector4U to ensure the data between the two versions was in-sync. All this led to a seamless transition from heavily-customized to the new version, which left the IT leadership team of the client in a state of shock, due to the quickness and low-cost implementation. This customer case clearly illustrates how we can combine advisory services, implementation services and our Store Apps to deliver great results for our clients.

What does the future hold for your organization?

Over the last few years, we grew from three founders, in 2013, to more than 150 employees recently. We recently established a new office in Boston; we’re building a team there. We’re also a proud owner of an entity in India titled 4mation Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. In the next 12-18 months, we have plans to explore other geographies as well. As for products, we will be launching a new app called 4Industry. We’ve also decided to split our organization into two separate legal entities. All the apps are now offered by App4mation and our services are delivered by Plat4mation. Our philosophy revolves around giving our clients prescriptive advice. The only way to do that is to ensure that we learn from past projects and transform lessons learned into valuable implementation assets.