Jabil powers manufacturing and customer success

Jabil depends on IT to deliver key capabilities that support thousands of customer engagements
As a leading global manufacturer, Jabil helps customers turn groundbreaking ideas into successful commercialized products. The company prides itself on its innovation, market expertise, and engineering excellence, which make it a trusted partner for companies that need to solve complex, industry-specific challenges.

IT plays a critical role in the value that Jabil delivers to its customers. Its business units depend on IT to deliver key capabilities that underpin thousands of customer engagements across design, development, manufacturing, delivery, and support. Servicing these business needs is a top priority for IT, requiring close cooperation, responsiveness, and reliable execution.

For Jabil’s IT team, effective project portfolio management is critical to meet these demands
That’s why project portfolio management (PPM) is a core focus for Jabil’s IT team. It needs to effectively manage its project lifecycle from initial demand through to resourcing and program management. Rather than accepting the status quo, IT is constantly looking to strengthen its PPM processes, driving better outcomes for Jabil’s business and customers.

As part of this commitment to world-class program management, Jabil’s IT team recently decided it needed to replace its legacy PPM systems.

The company’s legacy PPM tools were fragmented, inflexible, and difficult to maintain, resulting in inefficiencies and data quality issues
Lori Medeiros, Jabil’s Global IT PMO Director, says. “We had outgrown our existing system. Or rather, systems. We had one tool to handle demand workflows—approvals and so on—and another one to manage our projects. And, because the two didn’t talk to one another, we needed a third system for end-to-end reporting. That caused us all sorts of issues. For instance, our project managers had to cut and paste demands into projects once they were approved, which was a waste of time. And, with multiple systems linked by manual processes, we were concerned with maintaining data quality.”

Egbert Ortega, Senior IT Project Manager at Jabil, talks about other issues with the company’s IT PPM tools. “Our demand workflows are quite complex, and the workflows need to be constantly updated to match growing business needs. Creating these workflows in our existing tool was very difficult, and they were hard to maintain. We had similar issues with our project management tool—we needed to extend it to meet our requirements, but there was no way to make these changes ourselves. Instead, we had to put in feature requests to the vendor, which could take up to a year to complete. In the meantime, we were forced to put in manual workarounds, which of course heightened data quality concerns.”

Jabil’s IT team leveraged ServiceNow to unify its PPM processes, increase flexibility, and make things easy for its business partners
To address these issues, Jabil’s IT team needed a single platform that combined demand and program management capabilities with a flexible, easy-to-use workflow engine and end-to-end reporting. It also wanted to be able to extend the platform by itself, rather than having to rely on the vendor.

Jabil chose ServiceNow. “We already used ServiceNow for IT service management, so it was an obvious choice,” Lori explains.

Lori continues, “But I don’t want you to think that we compromised when it came to PPM. We carried out a full evaluation of PPM vendors, and ServiceNow came out on top.”

By unifying its PPM processes, Jabil has increased operational efficiency, enhanced data quality, and improved on-time project delivery
Since moving to a unified ServiceNow PPM solution, Jabil has seen numerous benefits. To start with, Lori says that they have seen a 25% improvement in operational efficiency with one tool, and workflows are much easier to create, administer, and maintain. As a result, Jabil has been able to shift the resources it’s saved into other areas such as organizational change management, which has had a dramatic impact on the success of their projects.

However, efficiency gains pale when compared to the impact on Jabil’s IT projects. Since making the transition, the company has seen a 40% increase in on-time project delivery. Thomas McCabe, IT Program Manager at Jabil, attributes much of that improvement to better data quality, saying, “When we had multiple tools tied together by manual processes, people were suspicious of the data. They just didn’t believe the information and discounted it, so project management didn’t get the right level of focus. Now people trust the data, so they pay attention to the quality of the projects themselves and use data from the system to help solve project problems.”

ServiceNow is also helping Jabil track time more accurately and make better use of its resources
Timesheet compliance is another area where Jabil has seen major progress. With its previous tools, timesheet compliance only stood at 40%. Now, it stands at 93%.

According to Jack Zygadlo, Jabil’s ServiceNow PPM application administrator, “A lot of the improvement is due to ease of use compared to what we had before, combined with process improvements we’ve made. However, it’s also because ServiceNow gives us resource management functionality, which we didn’t have before. Our senior leaders see the value in this and have made it everyone’s responsibility to record their time.”

Lori echoes the point. “We’ve just started out with ServiceNow^® Resource Management, with an initial deployment for one of our business units. When we started to look at how our resources were being utilized—or not utilized in some cases—there were a lot of ‘aha’ moments. Now, people are better utilized than ever before.”

Jabil continues to enhance its PPM solution and sees further opportunities both within and beyond IT
Looking forward, Jabil is continuing to expand its PPM solution. It plans to roll out resource management across IT, and it is expanding the use of demand management to include ranking of demands, giving its business partners a way to efficiently and accurately prioritize work for IT. ServiceNow^® Agile Development is also on the agenda, as is ServiceNow^® Governance, Risk, and Compliance, and ServiceNow^® Performance Analytics.

More broadly, Jabil sees significant potential for ServiceNow PPM beyond IT. Lori says, “We have a lot of interest from the project managers who manage engineering projects in our business units. We haven’t opened the doors yet, but ideally we would like this to be our enterprise PPM solution.”

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