OpenText™ Solutions Business Manager, formerly from Micro Focus is enterprise-scale business process automation software. It helps IT quickly create, adapt, deploy, and govern process-based apps and workflows for humans and systems across the organization.
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ServiceNow Now Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The ServiceNow Now Platform is a digital workflow building and extension tool for ServiceNow featuring a number of low-code / no code tools.
How many users will be using the system? What part of the organization will own the product? Serena is a great workflow tool. It can be tailored to fit in any scenario and so I dont believe there is any situation where it would be inappropriate.
ITSM is straight forward creation of Incidents and Requests. It can get more confusing as you layer more modules on top of it with event management, risk, project, etc. It also becomes more costly as everything is a different license. Integration between other external applications is very easy to do with their API. You can easily create endpoints for external apps to talk to or create REST messages for the platform to reach out directly.
One of my favorite capabilities within the Serena user interface is the reporting. Detailed searches into the workflows allow the users to create reports containing any field that is in the workflow. Users here use the reporting during review time to pull metrics on tickets they have worked during the year. From a process perspective, the system provides a specific report with details around how long the items have been in various states. I use this information to measure my process peformance and to identify bottlenecks within the processes themselves. The reports are fairly easy to use but they can also be very complex too. Reports can be set up and shared across groups. Generic reports can also be set up so that query at run time fields can be entered.
Developing new processes in Serena Business Manager is relatively easy and does not necessarily need to be done by a developer. Serena has added some key features that reduces the need to add Java scripts. Serena Business Manager is a blank slate and it can be as complex or as simple as you make it. The forms are the same. I have seen some very simple designs and some very complex and beautiful form designs.
From a user perspective, it is fairly simple to just pick up and start using. I introduce our new hires to the systems in a thirty minute session. Most users are more confused by which process to use for what than by how to use the system.
Serena's documentation for the product is well written but it can be a bit challenging because it is often missing key components, best practices or tips and tricks that you get when you call into their customer support. It is also very frustrating to have their release notes refer back to their knowledge base to have their customers figure out what they fixed in their releases.
Serena Business Manager manages their users in an Administrator function. Any changes made in this part of Serena is only logged in the database. It would be nice to have some reporting out of of this system. When you have multiple administrators of a system, it would be a nice feature to have some reporting here rather than having to go into the database.
The notification feature within Serena can be a bit challenging and time consuming. You can't copy the notifications so if you want to duplicate a notification you had previously created you have to recreate it again. The notifications have three levels to them and they can be a bit tricky to get them to work just right.
The ServiceNow performance speed has big room for improvement, as it is quite slow in loading Dashboards with more than 5-6 widgets. We are keeping our ServiceNow version up to date with latest releases.
Usually there are issues with having multiple ServiceNow tabs open in the browser and have different dashboards open in those tabs.
The way of showing a history log of all activities on Incident ticket is not optimal and easy to use or search in and have very old design.
While we are very likely to renew, we are also assessing if we should renew all of what we currently subscribe to as we try to reduce costs. Some parts of the business feel there may be a better tool out there to fit their process requirements. We are currently working with them to identify what those requirements are to see if it makes sense while also pointing out a reduced cost of tooling is not always the best fit if we have an increased cost of customization and maintenance between tools.
It provides a lot of modification options which is wonderful for certain team usage but becomes too much of a job when it comes to the Service Desk. Also on the app support side, since too much information can be carried, it affects the GUI and makes it complex.
I was not in the team that take care of the installation of ServiceNow but their feedback was very positive. Go live was done by the planned date and their support at the beginning provided always a timely response. Their customer service is friendly and easy to reach. Today we don't use their customer service anymore because we have an internal IT dedicated to maintaining the system.
We went through a re-implementation last year with a partner and were very pleased with the outcome. We looked at several partners and chose one that was able to provide an entire scope and cost upfront of what would be required to complete our requirements. We worked very closely with the dedicated team assigned to our project throughout the process and they fully delivered on all of our requirements that we presented in the initial scope.
We have been using Serena for eight years and I don't believe I can answer this question since it was so long ago that we made the decision to purchase Serena.
I've used Freshservice which is very similar to ServiceNow. I can definitely say ServiceNow performs better in a larger environment. Freshservice is usually used in smaller organization or less complx environment. Plus the ServiceNow reporting and dashboard features are more accurate than Freshservice. ServiceNow is a bit costly but gives way more features that really helps my organization.
1. It is not great when they can't seperate apps/products from a particular sku, forcing you to make a business case for a larger portion of functionlity than your current business case seeks to address. 2. ServiceNow reps are able to work with you when economies of scale are projected out. They are willing to start at a desired tier and provide pricing at applicable upgraded tiers
Very easy to use. Capture more data from the Incident and problem management. Easier to escalate and following the change management process to resole the issues.
We use Serena to standardize our business processes to ensure a more efficient work day experience for our employees. By having the employees use Serena for the processes we can ensure the process is completed the same way every time.
By having our key processes in Serena we are able to measure our processes at any time. Some of those key metrics include a 90% reduction in rework and a 47% reduction in overall process time. With the ability to measure processes at any time, we can react to process problems and correct them quickly. Serena Business Manager is flexible enough to allow quick development and rapid promotion when necessary.
Serena is very ingrained in our culture and the culture has taken on the "ticket" mentality unfortunately. With everyone trying to measure their work and justify their body counts through ticket counts, having a ticket opened for every act of work has become the standard.
Fast implementation of our Sales & Operation/Projects controls and process - tool adapted to our needs, not us to adapt to the tool.
Once we are a consulting/implementation company, our customers are happy to see that we use what we sell, and it is easy to show them how this platform/tool can have an impact on our own business.
