“I would confidently recommend this kind of solution for all kinds of companies that need to focus now on the digitalization of their services”
– Marco Peetz, Bayer Project Lead
Seeking an alternative to turn their current integration landscape on its head…
Driven by the want of Bayer to refocus on their core business by allowing their IT personnel to be freed from serving their infrastructure, Bayer launched an outsourcing program to run the IT for their German division. The contract which began on January 1 2020, commenced with one of the program’s suppliers CapGemini, partnering with Finland based ONEiO as the selected tool vendor to lead on the integration of Bayer’s entire supplier ecosystem.
When multinational life sciences company Bayer decided that they wanted to redesign their IT service delivery, they chose an ecosystem approach connecting five providers. Since this would turn their current integration landscape on its head in a very short timeframe, they reached out to ONEiO Cloud Oy to provide a solution.
“We are a life science company, not an IT technology company and that’s what we want to focus on.” states Marco Peetz, an experienced manager of Bayer’s Service Integration organization. With the ONEiO ecosystem in place, Bayer has been able to re-focus on their goals without losing resources, time or energy towards IT infrastructure.
How did the match between Bayer and ONEiO come to be?
Bayer’s new approach to Service Integration was guided by the principle, that each of the to be selected outsourcing partners should work within their own processes, toolsets, and system environments. This required a solution that would bring them all in one integrated setup. After one supplier recommended ONEiO, they did some initial research and utilized the ONEiO trial to further examine the platform.
Marco states: “We had different options on the table. In the end, we investigated all solutions, and what convinced us with ONEiO were two things:
One was the adaptor technology that was brought up, with predefined adaptors for standard ITSM solutions. This flexibility provides us the opportunity to quickly connect our ServiceNow environment with the Service Management systems of our strategic partners, regardless what kind of system they use.
The second one was the spirit of the company. ONEiO proved over the last couple of months that they play always with open cards, and this was visible during our early discussions when we started with a small proof of concept with approximately 3 to 5 adaptors. This is where we could see how passionate ONEiO was in delivering their services. That really convinced us.
In summary: we were convinced by the speed of implementation and the passion of work delivered.”
With a short timeline in place Bayer and ONEiO got to work to meet their vision…
In the beginning of 2020 and a given challenging timeline, Bayer connected in total 7 different Service Management systems within 6 months. “The target for these 6 months was clearly described with “workable ecosystem”: providers should work independently from each other and exchange transactional data like incidents or requests seamlessly across their systems. ONEiO is the heart of the entire environment. Without ONEiO this ecosystem will break” states Marco.
However, as the project progressed, the complexity of the project increased as new instances were needed to be incorporated.
“We decided we want to have a green field instance that we are building for the service integration part of the provider ecosystem. With that, we were suddenly facing a requirement to synchronize the current productive instance with that greenfield instance. This was one of the areas where ONEiO was a tremendous help, because we achieved that synchronization of incidents, problems, change requests between the existing and greenfield ServiceNow instances within a matter of 1-2 weeks which normally would have a been a huge project of several months.
Similarly, we could easily integrate a legacy Remedy system. Time was suddenly a limiting factor, because we had to make sure that legacy services could also be integrated with the services in future mode of operation. So, we basically achieved an integration of a legacy Remedy solution via our existing and greenfield ServiceNow instances to an actual provider instance. So that’s four hops and I didn’t know how we could achieve that with native integrations because it’s so complex. But with ONEiO that was just a matter of configuring it. It was really awesome” Marco explains.
Meeting their goals and short timeline Bayer and ONEiO were successful in completing the largest outsourcing project in Europe…
When Bayer set out to enact their plan to undertake such a large project, they did so with the hope they would be able to refocus on their core business by allowing the IT personnel to be freed from serving their infrastructure and get back to focus on their life sciences business.
“One of the benefits obviously, is that we need to have less people working in our own ServiceNow instance, since our providers use their own ITSM systems. Besides that, I think it’s like if the people were still actually working in our ServiceNow instance. I would consider that a good thing. We are sure that we can work that way and we don’t need to have the fear that something is not doable or achievable as it was before.” states Tobias Lemburg, Solution Arcitect, ITSM for Bayer.
And as for the system itself that ONEiO has helped to run, Tobias continues:
“Many things that I was very happy about. Just in general the overall architecture of the solution. It is in fact cloud based as many of the ITSM systems nowadays are as well, so we don’t have to have any local infrastructure to support the whole setup. I was surprised by the ease of the integrations and also the speed that you could achieve while doing that. As I said, being able to integrate two ServiceNow instances within two weeks is quite remarkable. We also get the support along with it whenever we need it. That wasn’t just an empty promise, we actually got all the support that we needed and when we needed it.”
Closing words from Bayer…
“We are absolutely impressed by the passionate support we get by ONEiO. This was basically more than outstanding, I do not have the words for it, how impressive it was. This is something unusual for a company and this is something we have not seen so far from other companies. Here’s a passionate team, delivering services at any time. This is really a big “thank you” in your direction as a company and to all of you guys that supports us here because this was really outstanding for us.” Marco says in closing.
About ONEiO
ONEiO is a cloud-native integration service provider. We are driving the industrial revolution in the enterprise integration space by removing all traditional integration challenges by automating integration delivery and production and providing integrations as a cloud-based, enterprise-grade, secure and always-on service with an affordable pay-per-use pricing model.
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