The chief information officer (CIO) at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories shared on Wednesday how the organization is utilizing ServiceNow to cut costs and drive efficiencies through a new idea portal and workflows.
At the ServiceNow Federal Forum in National Harbor, Md., on Wednesday, John Zepper – who serves as the CIO and executive director for information and security engineering at Sandia – said ServiceNow has been a great tool for Sandia in its technology modernization journey.
“It’s just a good way to get going,” Zepper said of ServiceNow, adding, “And we did this in three months.”
Zepper said Sandia was able to set up an ideal portal through ServiceNow within three months. The portal, known as the Unleash Excellence (UE) Crowdsourcing Tool, helps to drive ideation around specific problems Sandia wants to solve.
“We have two major goals at Sandia that we’re working on. One is around innovation, and the other one is around digital engineering. So, we used ServiceNow to launch this whole methodology and to do it quickly,” Zepper said.
Through the portal, he said Sandia is getting about 300 ideas every other month now, with idea managers reviewing the submitted ideas monthly. People can upvote their favorite ideas and see the status of ideas that are being considered and implemented.
Another way the ServiceNow platform is helping Sandia become more efficient is by building workflows.
“The power, for me, of ServiceNow is my workloads. If you do that in a very thoughtful way, you get efficient, you get more effective, then you get happier employees,” Zepper said.
For example, he said instead of reading 200 emails a day to figure out your tasks, tools like ServiceNow can pull all of those emails out into a workflow manager to do the tasking itself.
“Now everything comes into a workflow manager, and you don’t have to read 200, 300 email messages to find out what your tasking is,” Zepper said. “So, this is a very different way of thinking about it and a very efficient way. And then you can imagine the cost savings.”
As of November 2024, Zepper said Sandia had saved 410,000 labor hours with a cost impact of $47.1 million through the UE initiative.
“ServiceNow has some really good technology that I think differentiates them,” Zepper concluded.
Pete Luongo, vice president of solutions consulting at ServiceNow, added that using ServiceNow is an “easy decision.”
“The dashboards that are coming out … the more data you load in, the more visibility you get,” Luongo said. “You get a lot of that value, and then I think it probably ties into your innovation [goal].”
