Michael Glenn, Director of Architecture at Agropur, discussed the adoption of ServiceNow and his experience in using their SaaS offering for his multi-billion dollar dairy cooperative with theCube co-hosts  Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante live at the ServiceNow Knowledge conference.

“We’ve been a ServiceNow customer for two years,” Glenn said, mentioning Agropur started like most new customers with the basic module, and is now looking at where the next steps are, with a focus on project management.

Merging IT departments across two nations

Agropur, a cooperative in Quebeck, it is owned by dairy farmers. It is a fast growing business  spread throughout Canada and North-East USA. “We’re constantly expanding,” Glenn said, noting that the cooperative recently brought on a new CEO and has completed a few mergers. The most prominent project of late has been to merge three separate IT departments into one corporate IT department, and in order to accomplish that, they have leveraged ServiceNow’s offering.

Talking about the specifics of the industry, Glenn mentioned: “there is not space to grab new markets,” it’s about developing new products in the dairy and cheese market. The amount of consumption is not changing in this market.

From the perspective of a cooperative, there are specific communication challenges, as owners – who have to be dairy farmers – and employees come from various locations. Another issue to manage is that in Canada, milk production is regulated, milk is distributed according to needs, so what is produced by the cooperative’s owners is not necessarily going to their processing plants. From the IT point of view, the challenge is to link the farms and the distributors.

“We had quite a few apps build in-house for Lotus Notes, which we’ve been working for 12 years,” Glenn said, but the cooperative decided to change platforms as it became much harder to find Lotus Notes developers. What he likes most about ServiceNow is that here are a lot of similarities with Lotus Notes, he sees their offering as a development platform. “We like being able to configure it and modify it to suit our needs.”

Importance of easy app-building

Speaking of ServiceNow’s benefits, Glenn said that there was no comparison with the ease with which one can develop apps on this platform. “You don’t need to be a programmer,” anyone can create the application they need.

Discussing ServiceNow’s benefits, Glenn agreed that it’s a hard sell to the CFO. He said that Agropur started to look at new platforms two years before and at that point “ServiceNow was a footnote in our presentations.”  The cooperative’s CFO was interested in their offering and it became their first foray into the SaaS market. A benefit hat weighed into the decision, apart from the SaaS model, was that ServiceNow comes with all the applications, there is no need to keep buying something new. “You get a lot more bank for your buck here.”

“When you are doing strategic planning, you want to know which areas of the business are well served” or under-served by IT, Glenn explained, and having all the business processes in one place helps. “what’s been a winning thing for us has been the configuration management aspect,” he said, talking about advise on implementing ServiceNow. If you have the time to consider structure and organization when implementing the platform then base everything on it, “you’ll have a great view of what you’re doing.”