Votorantim Cimentos Europa, Asia & Africa maximises value with IT

About the client

Votorantim Cimentos is one of the world’s biggest producers of cement, concrete, mortar, and aggregates for the construction industry.

Headquartered in Sao Paolo, Brazil, the company operates in 11 countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, generating R$26.7 billion in annual revenues. The company is committed to decarbonising its production processes and is investing in innovative technologies to further reduce its carbon footprint over the next five years.

The challenge

The construction industry is eagerly adopting new technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and automation to improve productivity and operate more efficiently and sustainably. Votorantim Cimentos is a global leader in the research and development of innovative solutions to manage and reduce its environmental impacts.

When its regional operation, based in Madrid, wanted to streamline and standardise its IT ecosystem, it selected ServiceNow. Having grown rapidly in recent years, chiefly through strategic acquisitions, many legacy IT systems were in need of modernisation. The company also faced issues around its local contracts and licensing arrangements, and variations in the quality of IT services provided to teams in their home markets.

The company moved forward with ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) and appointed the Madrid office of ServiceNow EMEA Elite Partner, Devoteam, to manage the deployment.

The solution

The deployment of ITSM provided a single, centralised inventory of all requests for support, enabling responses to be prioritised with each request filtered to the team best placed to assist.

As a result of the automation within ITSM, the quality of each response was improved and resolution times reduced. Employees were able to review the progress of their request in the system, eliminating follow-up calls and emails. Trends and patterns within the thousands of requests could be identified, allowing for regional solutions to be put in place for the benefit of everyone.

We went for ITSM and ITOM together to resolve two pain points. We needed to streamline and manage incoming demand for support, and to detect and capture the assets and devices within our IT infrastructure. Using ITSM and ITOM in combination delivers more value.

Employees throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa now access IT support via a web portal and mobile app. Easy-to-use functionality and an extensive knowledge base and catalogue provides self-service at speed. Employees can now find answers and solutions to common questions instantly, such as resetting passwords.

A key enabler for better service availability was offering IT Service Management in multiple languages—Spanish, French, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, and English—to meet the needs of every employee, from executives in Madrid to production line workers in North Africa.

And for those preferring to use email or call a service desk for assistance—where internet connectivity is unreliable in a huge production facility—a ticket is automatically produced and integrated into ITSM, too.

To ensure the change management process, a series of “how to” videos were recorded so that the most important or repetitive actions with the tool were always accessible, both through the self-service portal and the corporate intranet of Votorantim Cimentos Europe Asia and Africa. In addition, a hyper-care service was provided for one month after the implementation, which initially was supposed to last for two months, but given that the implementation was simple, with no incidents or problems, it was set at one month.