For competitive reasons, the client has decided to participate anonymously in this story. Should you decide to go through the sales cycle with Leapwork, we are able to provide a reference call.

A major utility company manages critical energy infrastructure. Because they operate in a high-risk environment, system failures at any point can be extremely costly, meaning processes need to be incredibly robust and thoroughly tested.

Valuable resources spent on weeks of testing

Service desk requests, for example from energy suppliers, is an example of a critical process that must not break. At the utility company, these requests are all managed with the business process platform, ServiceNow.

The ServiceNow-based business processes include support requests from external stakeholders (suppliers and end-users of gas and electricity), internal IT service requests, and communication with vendors of IT products and services.

ServiceNow releases major updates to their platform twice a year. For each release, IT Service Management at the utility company had to test all their ServiceNow-based processes before rolling out the latest version to the entire organization to make sure that the flows had not been broken by the system upgrade.

The challenge was that the company didn’t have a team dedicated to do testing and monitoring of the ServiceNow application. This meant that, for each upgrade, IT Process Manager Dean Simonsen and his team had to rely on specialists across the organization to help with manual testing. This was highly problematic for several reasons:

• Testing is a time sink: Testing efforts took time away from highly skilled specialists’ primary tasks. In some instances, the company’s Customer Experience team, who were daily users of the system, had to spend an entire week testing ServiceNow manually.

• Testing was not structured properly: The ad hoc manual approach to testing done by people who were not professional testers was not documented, so results were never collected and evaluated in a structured way. 

• Testing was not done thoroughly: It wasn't possible to catch all significant bugs with manual testing and limited resources.

Dealing with quality issues and security threats

This inefficient approach to verifying whether business flows would work with a new release of ServiceNow delayed the roll-out of the latest system version.

As a consequence, the company couldn't leverage new platform features as quickly as they wanted to. This led to missed opportunities for doing things smarter in the business. Furthermore, delayed system upgrades posed a challenge to the IT teams, because ServiceNow eventually phases out support for legacy versions of their platform.

To optimize the use of ServiceNow, to reduce risks of critical system bugs and security breaches, and to improve the quality of how service desk requests were handled, process automation was introduced.

Simonsen and the team evaluated the different solutions on the market that could solve their specific automation requirements. They looked for an RPA platform that would allow both technical users and non-developers to build and execute automation flows across functions – in and beyond ServiceNow processes.

Automating processes across the business

With the Leapwork Automation Platform, Simonsen and his team could automate the testing of business flows going across functions and departments involving multiple applications, including ServiceNow.

Simonsen completed a Proof of Concept of Leapwork for the IT Service Management department, but business management could easily see how the platform could be used for optimizing processes in several areas of the organization.

“I quickly demonstrated Leapwork to one of my colleagues, and I could just see how his face lightened up,” Simonsen said. “The possibilities for automation are endless.”

With Leapwork, the company automated tests of the visitation, assignment, and follow-up of service desk requests both from external and internal stakeholders.

The team built approximately 60 automation flows for verifying that ServiceNow-based processes run as intended and are handled properly. In relation to upgrades of ServiceNow, automation flows are run in both development and test environments once a day to ensure continuous testing of the specific modules of ServiceNow that are being changed.

Automation of business processes requires strict documentation of what is automated and how it works. With the Leapwork Automation Platform, all executed flows are automatically captured with video recordings, which served as great documentation for Simonsen and the team.

Leapwork does not require users to develop an extensive framework to support automation, and once built, the Leapwork automation flows require limited effort in terms of maintenance compared to other automation tools applied in the organization.

Results

• System testing no longer takes time away from business-critical tasks, like customer support.

• System upgrades and enhancements are released more often and with greater confidence.

• Automation flows ensure that new functionalities can be utilized faster, system bugs are fixed earlier, and risks related to system security have been reduced.