Suncor unleashes the potential of its people with ServiceNow

To thrive in a digital world, Suncor drives employee engagement and enhances business performance

As a leading global energy company, Suncor needs to create a sustainable competitive advantage and continuously improve business performance. That’s why the organization has embarked on Suncor 4.0, a far-reaching transformation strategy that is people-focused, data-driven, and technology-enabled.

Unleashing the potential of people is a key pillar of this strategy. According to Steve Gilliss, Manager of Solution Delivery and Process and Information at Suncor, “We want our people to care about Suncor and be committed to our shared success. That means we need to care about them by making Suncor a great place to work. A seamless employee experience is absolutely critical—which is why we’re using technology to break down barriers and make work frictionless.”

Suncor leverages ServiceNow to empower its people with consistent, intuitive enterprise services

ServiceNow is a key enabler for this people-focused approach. By giving employees a consistent, intuitive way to access information and services across the business, Suncor is increasing employee satisfaction, enhancing employee engagement, and fostering business agility—all critical elements of Suncor’s digital transformation journey.

Steve explains, “We brought in ServiceNow IT Service Management to replace our aging IT ticketing system. However, we quickly began to get interest from other parts of our business, with HR at the head of the queue. That was the starting point for rapid growth—almost a 45-degree trajectory.

We now see ServiceNow as our enterprise-wide system of engagement: the glue that brings everything together into one place and automates our service delivery processes.”

Suncor’s HR team uses ServiceNow to drive employee engagement, increase employee satisfaction, and free up resources to focus on what matters

Jim Finnigan, Suncor’s General Manager of HR Operational Services, says, “HR has a unique ability and opportunity to improve the employee experience and engage our people. The opposite can happen if we don’t get it right. For example, if we make it hard to select the right benefits for their specific family situation or get their pay wrong, they feel like the company doesn’t care, and they can disengage.

On the other hand, if we give them a delightful experience, they can become engaged. ServiceNow provides this delightful experience, working hand-in hand with our new HCM system, Workday (going live in 2021), to deliver intuitive and responsive services. Instead of struggling with arcane systems, employees can focus on their jobs—ultimately creating a safer and more productive organization that gives employees what they need to build their careers and support their families. That has a significant bottom-line impact.”

For Jim, the results of this employee-centric approach speak for themselves. “We started out by creating a portal for business leaders and then rolled out ServiceNow to all our employees. Historically, HR had no ability to measure customer satisfaction and anecdotal feedback suggested there was much room for improvement. With ServiceNow, we can actively measure and monitor customer satisfaction through metrics like Net Promoter Score.”

Jim continues, “We’ve got complete transparency across all of our employee interactions, so we can measure and improve our services. And, because we’ve empowered employees with self-service, we are creating space for HR to focus on value-added enhancements to service delivery, such as leveraging campaigns to improve understanding of key HR programs.”

Recently, Suncor developed a COVID-19 back-to-work app in just a few days using App Engine

HR is just one example of how Suncor is using ServiceNow to transform the employee experience. Suncor teams such as supply chain, facilities, and health and wellness are already using ServiceNow, with more planning to come on board. To respond to this demand, Suncor has built a dedicated ServiceNow development team that leverages leading-edge agile processes (and ServiceNow® Agile Development) to extend ServiceNow capabilities—including building new App Engine apps.

Steve gives a case in point—Suncor’s back-to-work app, created to protect employees in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Steve, “We were able to build a basic app in just a few days using App Engine, which we then extended iteratively over the following weeks. Now, the app handles everything from employee wellness checklists to ensuring that rooms have been cleaned. It’s fully mobile-enabled using ServiceNow Now Mobile, and it’s directly tied into key enterprise systems. For example, we’ve connected it to our card swipe system so employees can’t enter the building until they have completed their daily wellness checklist.”

How was Suncor able to build this app so quickly? Steve says, “It comes down to three things. First, we’ve invested in the right skills so we can develop quickly and efficiently. Second, we’ve created close relationships with our business partners, so we can understand their needs and turn them into well-defined, automated processes. Then, there’s the Now Platform®. It gives us a lot of capabilities for free—for example, organizational data—and we also get a lot of reuse across apps because we’re on a single platform. What used to take us a few weeks now takes a few hours; we often end up saving 90% of our development effort.”

Momentum continues to build across Suncor’s business

What’s next for Suncor? According to Steve, “We see almost unlimited potential, and that potential grows with every ServiceNow release. For example, we’re looking at ServiceNow’s upcoming Operations Incidents capability to automate equipment maintenance and repair processes for our field operations teams. Employee onboarding is another important area; we want to create a great first impression with our new employees. ServiceNow is also a critical component of our enterprise mobility strategy. We want ServiceNow to be the single system of engagement for all our enterprise services—one place where our people can find everything they need, just like a Google search bar.”

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