In business, the name of the game is efficiency. When a salesman has to spend hours organizing the details of a single order, he loses time he could have spent finding new leads. Let’s explore this scenario in the day of a salesman taking orders over the phone and dispatching service requests to the appropriate sources. First, we’ll see how this story unfolds without ServiceNow automation, then with integration in place between Salesforce and ServiceNow using RoboMQ Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP).
Let’s meet John, an operations specialist for Pearl Street Warehouse. He is asked by his manager to coordinate their annual maintenance and safety inspection of the warehouse and conveyor belts.
John heard about Apollo Mechanicals, which specializes in providing electrical and mechanical maintenance as well as maintenance certification to warehouses and industrial establishments. Apollo Mechanicals has a good team of experts and they often engage licensed third-party contractors to perform quality control, safety inspections, and regulatory certifications.
John calls Apollo Mechanicals for getting the annual maintenance and certification done. Steve, the customer service rep, picks up the phone and takes the order for John. He promises to schedule all the necessary activities within the next two weeks. Steve will get back to John with the details once he has contacted the mechanics and the inspector.
After ending his call with John, Steve looks at his list of contractors and in-house mechanics to identify and contact the right team for the job. Deciding on the right person for each task takes time, as does calling each one individually to check for availability and explaining the upcoming job at Pearl Street Warehouse. After scheduling and confirming the tasks, Steve sends each worker an email detailing the job and site location.
Steve now has Eric, an independent contractor who will take care of electric maintenance at Pearl Street Warehouse. Mike, a full-time employee at Apollo Mechanicals, is a specialist with mechanical equipment and cranes and will perform the mechanical maintenance. Henry is an independent contractor who is a certified inspector. Once Mike and Eric have completed mechanical and electrical maintenance, Henry will perform the safety inspections. Finally Steve can get back to John and let him know that his service order will be taken care of. Juggling these calls has taken Steve most of the day, leaving him with little time to focus on tracking down more leads for his business.
Running a business this way is not scalable. Many salespeople spend a good amount of their time scheduling and coordinating the orders. To solve this problem, Apollo Mechanicals starts using ServiceNow for incident and workforce management. They look at integrating Salesforce, their existing Order and CRM platform, to ServiceNow so that they can automate the ordering process in Salesforce with the incident and workforce management process in ServiceNow. This integration will free up salespeople and bring operational efficiency that will allow the salespeople to focus on growing their business.
Let’s look at an alternate story where the integration between Salesforce and ServiceNow is already in place. Now, when a customer calls Apollo Mechanicals, the salesperson picks up the phone and creates an order in Salesforce. While the customer is on the phone, the salesperson creates the order and attaches all the line items representing the services requested by the customer. By the time the customer hangs up the phone, the order is ready to be automatically dispatched to the right resources and experts who will be performing the jobs.
When an order is created in Salesforce and the items are attached to the order, RoboMQ pulls up the order and the item details in the integration flow.
FIGURE 1: FLOW OF SALESFORCE TO SERVICENOW INTEGRATION
This automation magic happens behind the scenes at the integration layer provided by RoboMQ.
When an order is created in Salesforce and the items are attached to the order, RoboMQ pulls up the order and the item details in the integration flow.
FIGURE 2: AN ORDER IS CREATED IN SALESFORCE AND SERVICE LINE ITEMS ARE ADDED TO IT
The integration flow comprising of the Microservice or business functions applies the business rules to map each of the line items in order to a person or group performing the services for the creation of an incident in ServiceNow.
FIGURE 3: INTEGRATION LAYER APPLIES MAPPING OF LINE ITEMS TO THE RESOURCE AND INCIDENT IN SERVICENOW
With the identification of the person, group, or the third-party vendors performing the services, the integration layer creates an incident in ServiceNow by making an API call and assigns the tasks to the identified resources.
FIGURE 4: A SERVICENOW INCIDENT IS CREATED BY ROBOMQ INTEGRATION LAYER
With integration provided by RoboMQ, clients have incidents created in ServiceNow for each order created by their sales team as soon as they hang up the phone.
Salespeople can now focus on generating and targeting leads and closing the orders. ServiceNow takes care of dispatching the tasks to the mechanics and the inspectors and getting the order fulfilled. Once the tasks or the incidents are completed, a reverse integration from ServiceNow to Salesforce updates the order closing the sales cycle.
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