Introduction
A major global manufacturer and marketer of home appliances headquartered in Michigan, United States were using ServiceNow and IBM Rational Team Concert to manage their day-to-day support for IOT enabled Home appliances service with the internal Engineering software delivery team. Based on organization-wide changes in their internal software development processes and policies, this manufacturer decided to integrate the applications to bring workflow unification and better delivery of Service Requests. This raised the need for capturing and channelizing the existing “Ad Hoc Features”, “Catalog Task” and “Incidents” in ServiceNow to RTC “Features”. Kovair took the challenge to integrate highly customised ServiceNow instance with tailor made solution on IBM Rational Team Concert [RTC]
Their Challenge
As ServiceNow and IBM RTC were working in silos it was very time consuming for the internal support team to search the derived resolution in the “Feature” artifact of RTC. The “Features” for internal team in RTC are created through the synchronization of ServiceNow submitted “Incidents”, “Ad hoc Features”, “Catalog Task” and “Requested Items”. Without both tools talking to each other -providing relevant information back to the internal customers facing team was a pain. The whole purpose of ServiceNow “Service Catalog Management” is to deliver and manage a single source of consistent information of all the operational services and to ensure the relevant RTC “Features” are complete and mapped.
Specific Support team members always log into IBM RTC and then search for the “Features” and its corresponding resolution and release details. These details had to be manually entered in the problem tickets. Any change in the issue release dates in IBM RTC would again require a manual update in the corresponding Artifact record in ServiceNow. This was a tedious process resulting in a lot of manual effort, time and additional cost and customer response delays. The major portion of the integration suffice the need of delivering various versions of software for their IOT enabled home appliances.
Moreover, both the systems are highly customized by the tool vendor to map the internal workflow adherence.
The Solution
The Client selected the Kovair Omnibus as the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for the integration requirement and engaged with Kovair team to design, connect and implement data integrations between two customised applications. Kovair delivered a highly robust and customised adapter for IBM RTC and ServiceNow to talk to each other to converge various data from ServiceNow to RTC.
Integrating IBM Rational Team Concert and ServiceNow makes it easier for business and product development engineering to coordinate with each other, accelerating delivery cycles and efficiently scaling agile practices. All Incidents, Ad Hoc Features, Catalog Task from ServiceNow are automatically synchronized to IBM Rational Team Concert and vice-versa.
Kovair Omnibus Business Values
Following is the identified business value of Kovair from a customer perspective
- Single platform for Collaboration – Business Information across the two tools is no longer scattered – which is now unified by Omnibus. The internal engineering team is now well connected to the external facing support team as all information is now shared in real-time across teams including the legacy tickets.
- Productivity – both teams can manage day-to-day tickets effectively and there are no lags as the integrated tools will update the most current information possible.
- Ease of Integration and Onboarding – Kovair Omnibus and its robust customized adapters/connectors are deployed in the customer premises in hours and connected for sync within a couple of days with zero downtime.
Conclusion
The Kovair Omnibus integration platform in place and deeply integrated with its existing ecosystem, has helped this Appliance Manufacturer reduce time-to-market while increasing the quality of its products. It has increased their productivity by many folds – business data from the two business units now can collaborate on the target process system within their tools of choice, rather than through inefficient means. The Client has achieved velocity in delivery using Omnibus integration platform – however they are also maintaining well-established processes proven to support highest level of quality.
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