Case Study

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The Maschhoffs is the largest privately held pork producer in the United States. This 150-year-old, family-owned company has its roots in operations; yet dramatic company growth has prompted a new focus on IT. In less than two decades The Maschhoffs has grown from fewer than 50 employees to over 1100 direct employees. An additional 450 Production Partners, family farmers who raise pigs within The Maschhoffs network, are also supported by The Maschhoffs IT department. Working together, The Maschhoffs and their Production Partners produce enough pork to feed more than 10 million consumers each year.

Mike Segelhorst, Associate Director of IT Client Services, describes the ways in which ServiceNow supports his processes and helps him advance the company’s IT maturity within and beyond IT.

The three biggest IT problemsPork production is not typically technology-driven but rather, science-driven. But when the owners of The Maschhoffs began executing a growth-focused business plan that included three acquisitions in a short timeframe, Mike Segelhorst’s team was tasked to develop processes and automation to help IT be more responsive and efficient.

The company’s rapid growth meant that IT was almost always operating in reactive mode. Segelhorst identified three improvements he was determined to make:

Clarity and process – The SharePoint database they used as a ticketing system provided little insight to help them manage the growing backlog of unresolved tickets. They couldn’t distinguish requests from incidents because all tickets were stored in a single database, which made it nearly impossible to get useful metrics on the number and status of individual incidents.

Resolve incidents faster – Segelhorst estimates that fewer than 50 percent of incidents were resolved by Tier 1 with the SharePoint system.

Become proactive – IT used SharePoint to track activity, but without ITIL processes. The team realized enhancements to processes and systems would drive proactivity.

Today, The Maschhoffs have adopted many ITIL processes and use ServiceNow to carry them out. As a result, nearly 80 percent of the 1,000 incidents received per month are first calls resolved at the service desk. The improved resolution rate sends a strong signal to the business that their needs are important and that IT can handle them quickly.

Progressive IT. Family Style.

Highlights

ITIL takes hold in fast-growing, forward-looking pork producer

Organization

The Maschhoffs LLC

Business

Pork Production

Headquarters

Carlyle, Illinois, USA

Geographies

USA

Modern ITSM Software

ServiceNow® Incident Management Application

ServiceNow Service Catalog & Request Management Application

ServiceNow Knowledge Management

ServiceNow Managed Documents

Implementation Timeline

3 months

This ServiceNow case study is based on an interview with Mike Segelhorst, associate director of IT Client Services for The Maschhoffs.

“When I took over a year ago, we had more than 500 open tickets with 300 tickets over 15 days old in our system; today we have fewer than 50. I credit the process-based automation in ServiceNow for that improvement.”

Case StudyStarting IT Consolidation with the CMDB

Using ServiceNow’s Knowledge Management functionality, Segelhorst is training his Tier 2 staff in writing policies and in the difference between policies and standard operating procedures (SOP). With consistent knowledge base articles, Tier 1 staff is better equipped to resolve problems on the first call, freeing up Tier 2 staff for higher-priority work.

ITIL processes out of the boxWith a small IT team, The Maschhoffs had little in-house development experience, but Segelhorst found that ServiceNow required very little customization. “ServiceNow provides real value as a rapid development platform,” says Segelhorst. “The base configuration is built around ITIL best practices that you can use nearly out of the box.”

Even for a team still cutting its teeth on ITIL, configuration went smoothly. Within days of go-live for ServiceNow Incident Management, Service Catalog & Request Management and Knowledge Management, members of the IT team had individualized dashboards showing exactly which tasks they were responsible for. Automated processes allowed them to quickly begin resolving the backlog of tickets Segelhorst inherited.

“When I took over, we had 300 tickets over 15 days old in our system,” he recalls. “Within a year, we had worked the backlog down to fewer than 50. I credit the process automation in ServiceNow for that improvement.”

Pressed into veterinary serviceIn the early stages of the move to ServiceNow, Segelhorst kept the directors on the business side informed. He walked them through the ITIL framework and shared the concepts of service management. Once ServiceNow was fully operational, he presented performance metrics to them and explained that the

improvements were a result of ServiceNow and the combination of written policies, SOPs and process automation.

The director of veterinary services wondered whether ITIL principles and process automation could apply to his operations, given the group’s own service delivery model:

Small team distributing services to many users – The veterinary services team consists of three vets and a few technicians who provide services to hundreds of field advisors from The Maschhoffs.

Veterinary “service desk” for triage  – The small veterinary team receives calls from field staff in the course of overseeing the health and well-being of the animals. They prescribe treatment to several different partners and handle follow-up calls.

Knowledge shared among “service desk” staff – The veterinary staff needs to stay abreast of both broad industry knowledge and specific treatments applicable to The Maschhoffs.

Segelhorst has met with his implementation partners about using ServiceNow in veterinary services. Data gathering is underway to identify how to use ServiceNow to automate veterinary processes, and The Director, Health Services has enrolled in an ITIL Foundation class.

Converting the skepticsDespite the lack of ITIL experience at The Maschhoffs, Segelhorst was committed to ITIL as the basis for process improvement. He immersed himself in it to determine how best to apply it to The Maschhoffs’ business model. Some of the IT staff was hesitant about the changes Segelhorst proposed, but once ServiceNow went live, they became nearly instant converts. “Once we turned on ServiceNow, it was almost a

“Once we turned on ServiceNow, it was almost a night-and-day difference among our skeptical users. Within a week or two, it was as if they’d been using the system for years.”

Case Study

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night-and-day difference among skeptical users,” reports Segelhorst. “Within a week or two, it was as if they’d been using the system for years.”

The positive reception to ServiceNow Incident Management, Service Catalog & Request Management and Knowledge Management has laid the groundwork for Segelhorst to begin automating other processes. In the coming year his team will implement the ServiceNow Problem Management and Change Management Applications. They also plan to integrate ServiceNow with Success Factors, the cloud technology used by the HR organization. Segelhorst will also look for other areas of integration to further the use of ServiceNow for service automation across the business.

On a deeper level, Segelhorst is coaching his team to look beyond individual metrics like server uptime or application availability, and begin to combine those metrics to create a

service that provides value to the business. Defining formal service level agreements (SLAs) and measuring performance against them is next on his development priority list.

“We haven’t lifted formal SLAs off the ground yet,” he notes, “but the teams have informal ones, and we’re publishing more metrics weekly to hold people accountable, so even the informal ones are working. My target for the teams is to get our 15-plus-day-old tickets down to 25% of the total. It’s still a high number, but given where we came from, I’ll be ecstatic when we get down to that.”

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