OpenText™ Solutions Business Manager, formerly from Micro Focus is enterprise-scale business process automation software. It helps IT quickly create, adapt, deploy, and govern process-based apps and workflows for humans and systems across the organization.
N/A
ServiceNow Now Platform
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
The ServiceNow Now Platform is a digital workflow building and extension tool for ServiceNow featuring a number of low-code / no code tools.
How many users will be using the system? What part of the organization will own the product? Serena is a great workflow tool. It can be tailored to fit in any scenario and so I dont believe there is any situation where it would be inappropriate.
Using it in the application support team is worth it as it is capable of carrying a lot of information. But using it for a Service Desk operation might not be of much use as it won't be used up to its full potential and will be costly as compared to other alternatives available in the market.
One of my favorite capabilities within the Serena user interface is the reporting. Detailed searches into the workflows allow the users to create reports containing any field that is in the workflow. Users here use the reporting during review time to pull metrics on tickets they have worked during the year. From a process perspective, the system provides a specific report with details around how long the items have been in various states. I use this information to measure my process peformance and to identify bottlenecks within the processes themselves. The reports are fairly easy to use but they can also be very complex too. Reports can be set up and shared across groups. Generic reports can also be set up so that query at run time fields can be entered.
Developing new processes in Serena Business Manager is relatively easy and does not necessarily need to be done by a developer. Serena has added some key features that reduces the need to add Java scripts. Serena Business Manager is a blank slate and it can be as complex or as simple as you make it. The forms are the same. I have seen some very simple designs and some very complex and beautiful form designs.
From a user perspective, it is fairly simple to just pick up and start using. I introduce our new hires to the systems in a thirty minute session. Most users are more confused by which process to use for what than by how to use the system.
It helps put manage the request really well. It is easier to create a request, track the request and manage the request. It doesn't get lost into a pile of requests.
We've already pre-setted some settings into our ServiceNow. So it automatically assigns the level of urgency and mentions on the ticke if its a high or low priority request.
I really like the ServiceNow dashboards. They ate setup in a really nice way. The dashboards show the real time data aswell as old data incase if we need to see if there is a pattetn in the request or to fix any recurring issue.
Serena's documentation for the product is well written but it can be a bit challenging because it is often missing key components, best practices or tips and tricks that you get when you call into their customer support. It is also very frustrating to have their release notes refer back to their knowledge base to have their customers figure out what they fixed in their releases.
Serena Business Manager manages their users in an Administrator function. Any changes made in this part of Serena is only logged in the database. It would be nice to have some reporting out of of this system. When you have multiple administrators of a system, it would be a nice feature to have some reporting here rather than having to go into the database.
The notification feature within Serena can be a bit challenging and time consuming. You can't copy the notifications so if you want to duplicate a notification you had previously created you have to recreate it again. The notifications have three levels to them and they can be a bit tricky to get them to work just right.
Providing admins/devs with easier mechanisms for providing businss stakeholders with self-service admin capabilities across the platform
Tutorials on how to be the best at reporting in servicenow
Guided tour functionaltiy is a bit rigid and could use more workflow capabilities
Making it easier to push form variables to the user so there is more context when providing an approval. The out of box approval UI/form is terrible in my opinion.
While we are very likely to renew, we are also assessing if we should renew all of what we currently subscribe to as we try to reduce costs. Some parts of the business feel there may be a better tool out there to fit their process requirements. We are currently working with them to identify what those requirements are to see if it makes sense while also pointing out a reduced cost of tooling is not always the best fit if we have an increased cost of customization and maintenance between tools.
ServiceNow is a web platform that does not require any installation on a customer's computer. It is very easy to use and it is user-friendly. The customer started to open incidents very fast without investing time and money in training. Customer loves the dashboard at the startup where they can see all their open incidents or look at KB articles for any issue.
The platform is provided as a SaaS solution and support from the vendor has been good. There are regular software releases with bug fixes, new features and enhancements, and furthermore we are given the opportunity to fully test these before rolling these new releases out into the production environment to minimise the risk of business disruption
We went through a re-implementation last year with a partner and were very pleased with the outcome. We looked at several partners and chose one that was able to provide an entire scope and cost upfront of what would be required to complete our requirements. We worked very closely with the dedicated team assigned to our project throughout the process and they fully delivered on all of our requirements that we presented in the initial scope.
We have been using Serena for eight years and I don't believe I can answer this question since it was so long ago that we made the decision to purchase Serena.
ServiceNow was chosen as replacement for Microsoft Project , due to better licensing model, more flexible configuration of the project stages and components, better API with Azure DevOps. Also ServiceNow is best in the area of Incident and Service management systems and the proof of concept with Jira and incident.io were not successful and we kept relying on ServiceNow. ServiceNow is much more scalable than MS Project for constantly growing enterprise companies for both employee and external contractor type personas.
We use Serena to standardize our business processes to ensure a more efficient work day experience for our employees. By having the employees use Serena for the processes we can ensure the process is completed the same way every time.
By having our key processes in Serena we are able to measure our processes at any time. Some of those key metrics include a 90% reduction in rework and a 47% reduction in overall process time. With the ability to measure processes at any time, we can react to process problems and correct them quickly. Serena Business Manager is flexible enough to allow quick development and rapid promotion when necessary.
Serena is very ingrained in our culture and the culture has taken on the "ticket" mentality unfortunately. With everyone trying to measure their work and justify their body counts through ticket counts, having a ticket opened for every act of work has become the standard.
The biggest positive impact ServiceNow has made to our organization is reduced IT support cost. When we didn't use ServiceNow, we needed a bigger support team. Now we don't need as many support employees.
The other positive impact that I've noticed is faster solutions to any problems. ServiceNow makes very easy to resolve IT issues, in a efficient way. The tickets are organized in a way that the higher priority tickets get worked on quicker.
The dashboard has also made the job easy to find a recurring problem from its core and fixing it forever so that we don't repeatedly get the same issues again and again
