Aster Group, the ethical housing developer and landlord, has appointed Fruition Partners UK to support the implementation of ServiceNow across a range of core business services including IT, HR, facilities and finance. Aster Group owns and maintains over 28,000 homes and provides housing, care and support services to 75,000 customers, including the elderly and vulnerable. With over 1300 employees and revenues exceeding ?200 million, Aster is looking to Fruition Partners UK and ServiceNow to help streamline workflows, support the automation of range of key internal business services and, ultimately, enable change across the organisation.
Richard Strange, IT Operations Director at Aster, says the initial driver was the need to upgrade the group’s IT support, however, he adds, “there was an appetite for change across our other service functions, particularly facilities, HR and finance. Our goal as an organisation is to move from being dependent on traditional communications, such as email, phone and spreadsheets, to a self-service world where the delivery of key internal services is automated where appropriate.”
The group selected ServiceNow because, as Richard Strange says, “we identified that it could deliver the streamlined workflows and improved performance metrics that we were looking for, plus the potential for self-service and automation. In addition, as our workforce becomes more mobile, operating from our many sites across the UK, we knew that ServiceNow could provide the flexibility and mobile access to support services that we need.”
The group chose Fruition Partners to support its implementation because of its experience of implementing ServiceNow; the company was recently recognised for completing the most global deployments of the platform in 2015. Aster has begun to roll out its IT support implementation of ServiceNow, with facilities, HR and finance following over the next few months.
Richard Strange says, “Fruition’s experience is invaluable: ServiceNow is a hugely flexible platform and this is both a strength and a challenge, because there’s so much choice. Fruition are able to guide us in our choices, and help us phase our implementation so that everything works from the start. They’ve also run a number of workshops with our teams to help educate them about ServiceNow and ensure that key processes are reflected in the system. It’s early days, but I’m confident that Fruition and ServiceNow are going to help us transform service delivery at Aster.”
